The Universe Is An Optimisation Problem
by notasentientantcolony
Summary: A weird pre-apocalyptic reimagining of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in a retrofuturist AU with parallel universes, megacorporations, high magic, Cold War wizardry, and AI. "I've never been more confused or entertained in my life." - MurtGastin. "The world of Harry Potter feels magical again. Without feeling childish." - Guest. Updates every three Wednesdays!
1. Ch1 – The Cup

**AN: the jumps in perspective, time, and space in this chapter are jarring for many people – I'll try and give this chapter a fifth rewrite when I have the time. The other chapters are considerably easier to read than this one – the second and third chapters narrow down to one narrative line with extra bits, and the fourth chapter is the continuation of that single narrative line with no extra bits.**

 **AN/2: I post chapters on /r/rational and /r/hpmor, so check out those subreddits for discussion. I'm also planning to put this on AO4 and SpaceBattles! If you'd like to be a beta, please pm me!**

 _ **######**_

 _ **The Universe Is An Optimisation Problem**_

 **By Eigenstation/imasentientantcolony**

 _ **######**_

 _"What is your ambition?"_

" _To understand everything important there is to know about the universe, apply that knowledge to become omnipotent, and use that power to rewrite reality because I have some objections to the way it works now."_

—Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

 **######**

"To understand how something works, figure out how to break it."

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 **######**

CHAPTER ONE

 **######**

DO NOT MESS WITH:

TIME,

THE STRUCTURE OF MAGIC,

OR

THE CLIMATE CONTROL SETTINGS

(UNLESS YOU HAVE PERMISSION FROM YOUR SUPERVISOR)

THANK YOU

— engraved on all stationery in the

Department of Mysteries

and completely coincidentally written

on the wall of a public loo in Leicester

 **######**

If you want to know why the world is the way it is today, you'd need to take a trip to the Department of Mysteries. You'd also need a form signed in triplicate by the Minister of Magic, with the signatures of the Chief Thaumaturge of London, the Grand Sorcerer of the British Isles, the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, and – of course – the Department Director (who is a very busy man, not least due to the fact that at any given time, there are three of him walking through the Ministry's halls).

You'd have to pass through Level 0 of the Ministry, which has a pretty golden fountain and flying letters. After passing the security check, you'd descend to Level Minus One, which is populated mainly by interns working four-thousand hour weeks and people who stare at you suspiciously every now and then, paid primarily to contribute to the overall feeling of existential paranoia that pervades the Department.

Level Minus Two is the kind of floor where people ask questions like: "So tell me, does it eat human flesh?"

Level Minus Three is the kind of floor where people ask questions like: "Can we _make_ it?"

The thing that changed the world forever, is on a raised pedestal in Level Minus Twenty-Eight surrounded by a shimmering cobweb of blue light. It's a mug - a stained, slightly cracked, ceramic mug with a list of easily-pronounceable anti-hangover Charms printed on the side, along with its former owner's name (misspelt), filled with what looks like glowing vanilla ice cream.

As you descend the stairs, Albus Dumbledore, the Chief Warlock will tell you that the ordinary background magic concentration in, say, Wales – is around 0.0001 thaums per cubic centimetre. He'll also tell you that within the body tissue of a wizard, it's five thaums per cubic centimetre, and that up until 1931, the highest magic concentration ever recorded had been in the central locus of the Cup of Dawn when Merlin created the Interdict – about one hundred million thaums per cubic centimetre.

At this point, curiosity piqued, you'd naturally ask him: "How many thaums per cubic centimetre does the cup have?"

To which he would respond: "Around ten to the forty-one."

This is the unimaginatively-named Cup of Magic. It was created when a Junior Unspeakable named Reginald Rookwood sneezed during an experimental ritual to turn water into whiskey in 1931, and in doing so, knocked out every electrical grid in the Northern Hemisphere for four hours, permanently melted an entire Ministry corridor, caused an electrical storm to form over a corner store in Diagon Alley, and created a new island in the North Sea. Some people say it broke magic and doomed wizardkind forever, but over the sixty-three years between then and now, the Cup of Magic has powered over six hundred and eighty thousand rituals, several of which involved creating objects with a larger mass than the Moon and had to be conducted entirely in outer space.

The rippling consequences of the existence of the Cup of Magic, in part, is why tomatoes grow on Venus, why the Soviet Union controls Hawai'i, why Hermione blew up a skyscraper when she was twelve, why Harry Potter is a mind-clone of Tom Riddle, why Ozland Dwimmersmith was born, and why the world will probably end on April 14, 1996. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it would also probably be a good idea to quickly cover the events that occurred in the years before 1994, which is when everything _really_ begins.

And there's one more thing Albus Dumbledore will probably tell you. He'll tell you about leylines, about how wizards, with appropriate permission, can request for a new leyline to draw magic from the Cup for Ministry-approved rituals.

He'll tell you the strands of blue light are leylines, spreading out through time and space.

He's lying.

They're cracks.

 **######**

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE – THE WIZENGAMOT – 1983 - ELEVEN YEARS BEFORE THE PRESENT DAY

" . . . _achoo_ , ahem – as I was saying – a Muggleborn by the name of Edward Rotford, who received a 'Troll' marking on all six of his subjects, and was later expelled due to . . . "

You'd think winning a civil war would strengthen your political influence.

" . . . extraordinary waste of Ministry resources . . . "

You'd think _losing_ a civil war would weaken it.

" . . . universally abysmal, naturally – owing to their _dubious_ heritage . . ."

Many did, and they were wrong on both counts.

" . . . why, here — allow me to ask the Headmaster himself. Pray, if you would, _Mister_ Dumbledore, how many Muggleborn students _sat_ their NEWT examinations last year?"

"Sixteen. Regardless – "

"Mr Dumbledore, _another_ question, if you see fit to answer. How many Muggleborn Hogwarts students _passed_ their NEWT examinations last year?"

"Had they been properly schooled – "

"The unembellished answer, Lords and Ladies, is _three_. Three of sixteen. And of those three, only _one_ received marks above 'Acceptable'."

An excited hubbub immediately followed.

In truth, Voldemort had not stood against magical Britain. He had disrupted the prevailing order in the same way that pelting rain disrupts the mirrored surface of a puddle, while ultimately turning that puddle into a much bigger puddle. The Death Eaters (among their ranks many aristocrats and blood-supremacists) had represented nothing more than the radical movement for a more extreme status quo.

However distorted and skewed, it was the illustration that appeared in the _Daily Prophet_ on June 19, 1968, that most accurately encapsulated the sentiments of the British magical ruling-class. The illustration looked like this: to the right, was a muscled Amelia Bones, wrenching a screaming Abraxas Malfoy by the lapels, in the act of throwing him into a freshly-dug grave. To the left, was Bartemius Crouch, occasionally winking at the reader as he chiselled the word "NOBILITY" onto a gravestone. Looming above them all, stood Albus Dumbledore, with impassioned froth and spittle geysering from his wrinkled lips, waving about the commanding finger of octogenarian authority. "FOR THE GREATER GOOD!" read the speech-bubble emerging from his mouth.

It was a little on the nose, even by the standards of the _Prophet_.

It seemed that the Ministry and the hallowed halls of the Wizengamot could do nothing, for Dumbledore and his allies occupied all the most important Ministry posts, and had the sympathetic ears of many seats in both the guilds of the Mysterium and the hereditary seats of the Magisterium. He held the Line of Merlin, which could be passed on only in death (and it would be difficult if not impossible to kill Albus Dumbledore), and to rob him of the position of Chief Warlock by vote alone would have been a political impossibility.

Centuries of tradition, of accumulated power and wealth, were threatened with existential destruction.

Tom Riddle, in retrospect, had stepped in at exactly the right time.

And although his most fervent supporters had been imprisoned in Azkaban, the _foundation_ of his rule had remained unchallenged.

"I remind the Lords and Ladies convened," enunciated Augusta Longbottom, "that this Act was passed in a year in which many members of the esteemed Wizengamot were, in fact, Death Eaters using Polyjuice. Or simply Death Eaters." She left a long pause, during which many people looked like they were about to say something, and then slyly added: "Under the Imperius, of course." Then: " _Although_ , it appears that those selfsame Lords and Ladies continue to defend the policies crafted by none other than Volde – "

"Madam Longbottom, you forget yourself!"

And the debate raged on, although with every rhetorical parry and blow, it became clearer and clearer to Albus Dumbledore, and those who sided with him, that this battle had been lost.

" . . . accidental magic!"

" . . . rather rude, a terrible influence on my boy . . . "

The most powerful mage in Britain stood. Silence followed instantly.

Dumbledore was not smiling, nor did his eyes twinkle. Such things were reserved for Hogwarts, for the children.

"To the Wizengamot, I restate these unadorned facts in the hope that in these final few minutes of contemplation, you shall find yourself erring on the side of sympathy for _all_ children born with Merlin's gift, leaving aside the circumstances of their parentage.

"Wizarding children born to magical parents are permitted to practice wanded magic from the age of nine. They are furthermore permitted to attend private academies and receive private tuition from this age onwards. At the age of eleven, they are permitted to attend Hogwarts, and receive five years of formal tuition. This is known to you."

There were various nods from his faction, but most of the purple robes were indifferent.

"Yet wizarding children born to non-magical, or negligibly-magical parents, are barred from knowledge of magic – likewise, attendance at Hogwarts – until their fifth year. They receive, at _most_ , three years of tuition. First-generation wizards, quite simply, receive less in the way of education. Is it no small wonder that their academic performances are poorer than those with the benefit of magical backgrounds? Do you not conflate cause with effect?"

"Foolish old man," someone murmured.

Dumbledore looked sharply at him, and the man shrunk under his gaze, but it had been said and heard.

A few final words were exchanged, a final vote was called, and there were some hands in the air, but not enough.

Not nearly enough.

Among the Lords and Ladies aligned with Lucius Malfoy's faction were many condescending smiles, as the final vote was tallied against the proposal of Albus Dumbledore, the Chief Warlock.

"By the ruling of the twenty-first session of the one-hundred-and-ninety-fifth Wizengamot, §11.1a of Article V of the Muggleborn Safety Act of 1977, shall _not_ be repealed."

 **######**

"...incomplete nature of the ritual. Wanagathan 1973 made the claim that 'ach' (falling, inflected, no emphasis, heavily aspirated) - the ending symbol commonly used in most transformation-type rituals made by intermediate-novices (see Egy 1927, Aschelter 1936) in lieu of dynamic redundancy - followed by 'oo' (standard) is a multiplicative combination which could continually reinforce ambient magic until dismissed by an exhalation symbol. We respond to this claim by reminding Wanagathan that actual sneezes are very rarely vocalized as 'achoo' - they are instead violent outbursts of air which do not correspond to the phonologies of most languages. Instead, we believe the unique product of the Rookwood Whiskey Ritual could be explained precisely by the presence of this 'out of bound' sneezing symbol, which could potentially disrupt the matrix alignment of previous symbols, shifting certain rows by unit one in any of twenty-eight possible directions, according to our calculations in this paper. Rookwood himself suffering memory-loss after the magical explosion, and most of the original ritual being irrecoverable, we believe, having analysed the fragmentary evidence that exists, there is a possibility that the ritual was of a particularly dangerous form-substance-form type that involved the transformation of water into pure magic, and then back into whiskey, with the form-to-substance transformation occurring outside of temporal-spatial boundaries. Proceeding from this, the introduction of an 'out of bound' symbol may have prevented the substance-to-form transformation from fully completing, leaving only pure magic in a metastable state (enabled by its sheer density). This hypothesis would elegantly explain all observations concerning the Cup of Magic as recorded by Kagnarr 1932."

Extract from the Journal of the Cyprian Thaumaturgical Research Society (pg. 103, Vol. 22)

 **######**

TOM RIDDLE – BORGIN AND BURKES, KNOCKTURN ALLEY, INSIDE AN EXPANDED POCKET OF INTERDIMENSIONAL SPACE, LONDON – 1949, FORTY-FIVE YEARS BEFORE THE PRESENT-DAY

Tom Riddle (who was not yet Lord Voldemort) was on his way to solving two people's problems at once. The first problem was that the majority shareholder of Colossan Trust, Walter Rockefeller, wanted a powerful wizard to protect Tibbles – his cat – from harm. All harm. He'd described it like this: "Mr Riddle – if Tibbles gets thrown into the Sun, I want the Sun to be the one who comes off worst."

The second problem was that the British government needed someone who could deal with the IRA. And by 'deal with', they really meant it. With the quotation marks and everything. In official governmentspeak, it was: "We wouldn't condone a _genocide_ , Riddle, but the British community will understand perfectly well if more severe measures are necessary to end this war on a permanent basis."

If you can't see a way to solve both of these problems and make money at the same time, you're probably not Tom Riddle.

But the solution to those two problems created a third problem for him: there weren't any rituals which could actually create over a million Horcruxes at once, and probably even less that could make them for a cat.

On the other hand, Tom knew that he could probably figure one out by the end of his shift.

"What's that, Tom?"

He was startled from his reverie by Caractacus Burke, the obnoxious owner of the store. Burke was rarely interested in the fascinating items that came in and went out of his store, only in ensuring that jingly gold coins mostly went in one of those directions. He had a thick, greasy moustache which, if wrung out over a frying pan, would probably provide enough oil to make French toast with. Burke's manner was stooped, thinly curious, intruding, and his breath smelt like horseradish and turpentine.

Tom silently vowed that, after all of it was over, he would kill Burke very quickly and efficiently, not because he deserved any reprise from a painful death, but because he wasn't worth more than a half-second of Tom's time.

"It's a diagram of a sacrificial runic circle designed to kill everyone inside of it, turn their corpses into Horcruxes, and shoot the corpses into space at a hundred kilometres a second," was what he badly wanted to say. Instead, he said: "It's a diagram of a runic circle designed to stabilise volatile potions, sir."

"Interesting, very interesting," Burke breathed, his eyes gleaming, "I used to dabble in that kind of thing. How does it work?"

Tom fired off a long stream of made-up runic-ritual sounding words and inwardly sighed every time Burke gave a shrewd nod, as if he actually understood.

"Well now, I think that might just work," he said after Tom had finished.

"I'm not quite sure it will, sir," Tom replied, "so I'm visiting a runician in Ulster who might be able to help me work out the details. Although there is another purpose to my visit - I believe he also has a fragment of the original Cup of Dawn."

"Oh yes?"

"Indeed, sir. I'm thinking I'll pay a little more than necessary to get his cooperation on my runic circle designs and maybe I'll - "

"Ah, I don't think that will be strictly necessary, Tom. That's not how you negotiate these things. A fragment of the _original_ Cup of Dawn, you say?"

"Yes, sir," Tom gritted out.

Caractacus Burke stroked his chin. "Well, what say you I come with? When's it?"

"Oh, it'll be a month or two at the very least. He's a very busy man."

"I'll make the preparations. Let me know once you have an exact date, Tom. Very good work."

Tom Riddle always did everything perfectly, so nobody saw him carve deep, jutting lines into the grounds around every Republican stronghold in Ireland - and the people who did, didn't remember. The late forties were the golden age of new rituals, and the Cup of Magic was not yet under lock and key on Level Minus Twenty-Eight of the Ministry basement, so nobody was especially suspicious when an enterprising young man, fresh out of Hogwarts, filled in the form requesting for a few new leylines so he could draw magic from the Cup. Even when those leylines were mysteriously extended by a few thousand kilometers, the only thing people thought was mysterious about _him_ was his relationship status.

On December 10, 1949, when there was a deafening supersonic bang that was heard from Nova Scotia to beyond the Ural Mountains, when three point eight million people were suddenly missing, and when a cat and a certain Tom Riddle were suddenly _very_ immortal indeed, nobody suspected the boy at the counter of Borgin and Burkes.

By six o'clock, after stopping by Walter Rockefeller's mansion in California, he was about two metric tonnes of gold wealthier.

By eight o'clock, after meeting a shady man in a Scottish corner-street, he had about eighty million pounds worth of government bonds.

By nine o'clock, he was bored again.

By ten o'clock, after rearranging his name for half an hour, and staring at that day's edition of the _Prophet_ , he'd thought of something interesting to fill up time between then and eternity.

 **######**

 _The Wand_

MINISTER PUGEONN WARNS AGAINST INFLUENCE OF 'REACTIONARY FANATICS'

March 9, 1968

'LORD VOLDEMORT' WANTED BY MINISTRY FOR MURDER OF JOYCE STEWART

April 28, 1969

DEATH EATERS DECLARE WAR ON BRITAIN

January 3, 1970

 **######**

 _Dawning Moment Herald_

PRES. LABAR RE-ELECTED TO SERVE FIFTH TERM

November 4, 1992

His Ascendancy President Labar, leader of the free world, of the Dawning Moment, of the White Race, and of Colossan Tobacco (North America), a genius unparalleled in human history, has been re-elected, as determined by the Almighty, to serve His third term as President of the United States of America. His Ascendancy won with a spectacular 84% of the popular vote, with the Dawning Moment Party winning 56 out of 60 of voting states.

 **######**

 _Leaflet given out at the 1991 London Protest:_

THREE TRUSTS CONTROL YOUR WORLD

— _T_ _HE_ _C_ _OLOSSAN_ _T_ _RUST_ —

— _N_ _EGALOTH_ _I_ _NC._ —

— _T_ _HAUCORP_ _I_ _NTERNATIONAL_ —

ARE ALL OWNED BY _STANDARD HOLDINGS_

& COMMANDED BY THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF NINE.

THEY CONTROL WHAT YOU BUY.

THEY CONTROL WHAT YOU SEE.

THEY CONTROL WHAT YOU THINK.

THEY CONTROL YOUR LIFE.

WITHOUT ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY,

THERE IS ONLY DICTATORSHIP.

THE FREEDOM OF THE RULING-CLASS,

IS THE SLAVERY OF THE RULED.

THEY BELIEVE YOU ARE COMPLACENT.

ARE THEY WRONG?

"THOSE WHO DO NOT MOVE,

DO NOT NOTICE THEIR CHAINS."

— ROSA LUXEMBURG

 **######**

 _LARGEST PRIVATE ENTITIES BY MARKET CAPITALIZATION (MARCH 1992)_

 _1._ _Colossan Trust_ _— $6.6 trillion — finance, real estate, energy, manufacturing, defense, agriculture, construction, tobacco — 67% owned by Standard Holdings_

 _2._ _Negaloth Inc._ _— $3.8 trillion — media, telecommunications, cable & satellite, private defense, surveillance, government relations, advertising, entertainment, hospitality, transport, electronic media, debt collection — 85% owned by Standard Holdings_

 _3._ _ThauCorp International_ _— $2.1 trillion — aerospace, electronics, artificial intelligence, private education, research and development, pharmaceutical — 24% owned by Standard Holdings, 76% owned by Allan Unnman_

— _The Eagle_ (March 19, 1992)

 **######**

 _We commemorate this monument to Anita Gadberry, a primary-school student among the three hundred whose lives were violently foreshortened in this very London square, murdered by the Negaloth Private Defense Corps in the May Protest of 1991._

 _May she be forever remembered._

—Gadberry Monument

 **######**

HERMIONE GRANGER – DR DAVID WILLIGAN'S THERAPEUTIC PSYCHIATRY CENTRE, BALHAM, SOUTH LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – MAY 4, 1992 - TWO YEARS BEFORE THE PRESENT-DAY

 _One thousand soldiers face an advancing mob, resolute._

 _A bottle spirals, turns three times, and shatters._

 _In a second, gunfire fills the air._

 _Blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word._

 _Blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word._

 _Blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word._

"Hermione?"

The girl snapped back to attention in an instant. "Yes, sir?"

"If you don't mind, Hermione, I'd like to know what's on your mind." He paused to gauge her reaction, but her face remained impassive, as always. "I know you find these sessions annoying, but your parents are worried about you. I'd like to be able to assuage their concerns."

"Don't all parents worry about their children?"

He ignored her and continued. "Your school counsellor is also worried." Usually he would try and empathise with his patients – making light conversation. Unfortunately, Hermione Granger invariably managed to divert the conversation far away from talk of her wellbeing or mental health, until the one-hour session expired and he went home, immensely frustrated. He hadn't even been aware of it the first few times. This time, Doctor Willigan noticed, she had offered him only a half-hearted diversion. There was something she wanted to say, and he'd be damned if he knew what it was.

"Oh?"

"She's somewhat disturbed at how _well_ you've been . . . coping. Managing the trauma of losing someone close to you. She says you seem to be barely affected. She thinks you're channeling your . . . anguish into academic performance, however silly that may sound."

She lightly tapped her finger on her cheek.

 _Plock._

 _Plock._

 _Plock._

"Is that necessarily a bad thing, Mister Willigan?"

He momentarily choked. " . . . what?"

"Because most of the adults I know are pretty transparently driven by feelings of sexual inadequacy, fears of never attaining eminence or distinction, desire for status in highly competitive hierarchical environments, anxiety from failure to sufficiently conform to social norms . . . but I could name hundreds of scientists, engineers, and authors who were driven to greatness by traumatic deaths – "

"I – "

She continued as if he hadn't spoken. " – Harold Milton's mother passed away in 1974 when he was an undergrad at Ohio State University, after which he successfully developed the prototype whale-milk-hydrocarbon conversion method, and solved the energy crisis . . . in _Memoirs_ , Eula Kovach cited her anguish over the death of her fiancée as a large part of her motivation to write the fifty-million-word long _Godflesh_ series — Gilderoy Locker attributed his meteoric rise from Negaloth public relations consultant to a member of the Executive Council of Nine to rejection from his hometown. I could go on, but I think I've made my point."

 _That was prepared. And_ I _was the one leading the conversation_. "Your point?" The most frustrating thing about having Hermione Granger as his patient was that she clammed up. And when he prised her mind open, he would inevitably find another clam. An infinite set of delicately-constructed selves, with not a single slip or loss of composure. Levels and levels and layers and layers of paper-wrapping and colourful ribbons and strange loops.

But there was a fiery determination that shone through her eyes, and that was something she could never hide.

"Maybe I _am_ channeling my anguish. Isn't that better than burying it? I read the books you recommended to me last time." All of them? Should he have been surprised? "I know it's _bad_ to hide your emotions, they just end up . . . bubbling up somewhere else when you least expect it. I'm turning thirteen next month, Doctor. It's been almost a whole year since Anita died. At least I'm steering it somewhere _constructive_."

Willigan was curious. "Somewhere constructive?"

"I'm going to med school. I'm going to be a _dentist_. Just like my parents. And nothing is going to stop me."

 **######**

She was lying.

She was building a bomb.

 **######**

 ** _THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO VANQUISH THE DARK LORD APPROACHES,_**

 ** _BORN TO THOSE WHO HAVE THRICE DEFIED HIM,_**

 ** _BORN AS THE SEVENTH MONTH DIES,_**

 ** _AND THE DARK LORD WILL MARK HIM AS HIS EQUAL,_**

 ** _BUT HE WILL HAVE POWER THE DARK LORD KNOWS NOT,_**

 ** _AND EITHER MUST DESTROY ALL BUT A REMNANT OF THE OTHER,_**

 ** _FOR THOSE TWO DIFFERENT SPIRITS CANNOT EXIST IN THE SAME WORLD._**

— _Sybill Trelawney, 1980_

 **######**

 ** _HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN._**

 ** _HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD._**

— _Sybill Trelawney, 1991_

 **######**

 ** _THE TOWER AND THE GODDESS SEND CHARIOTS OF FIRE INTO THE SKY, AND END THE EARTH IN THEIR WAKE._**

— _Telesphorus Eastrodor, 1865_

 **######**

 ** _SHE, THE FIRSTE DOGHTER OF THE SEOFENTHE SONE, AND THE ONSE AND FU_ ȝ _ERE KING MARCDE BY LYTENNING, SHAL CROSSEN THE BRITTISH SOU_ ȝ _TH SE, AND BEREN A BEBLEEDYN CROWYNE._**

— _Taciturna Trelawney, 1317_

 **######**

 ** _GOLD BECOMES LEAD, AS LEAD BECOMES GOLD._**

— _Golofor Yammabagus, 1799_

 **######**

 ** _ALL ENDINGS SHALL BE ENDED BY THE CRUX._**

— _Augerna Hrosdóttir, 188 (first recorded prophecy in Britain)_

 **######**

FEBRUARY 26, 1993 - THE BOY-WHO-LIVED

Harry James Potter Evans-Verres fixed things.

He fixed faulty taps, fractured windscreens, ripped books, and wrecked umbrellas. Nothing electronic, nothing capable of recording anything, and with one caveat: you weren't allowed to watch.

"No seams . . . nothing. Where on Earth did you learn your craft, Harry? Ten pounds, wasn't it?"

"That's right, Mrs Figg," Harry replied politely.

"Come in, come in. Snowy, please make some room for our guest, here."

A malicious-looking cat looked up at him briefly from a chintz armchair, and stayed resolutely put.

"Don't mind him, Harry, it's his – "

"Favourite chair, yes, I remember."

She beamed at him, and tottered out of the room, presumably to search for her wallet.

"You know," Harry said, addressing Snowy, "if you get out of that chair, I'll leave mince for you out to the side of the driveway again. Fair?"

The cat flicked its ears.

"Two fifty grams."

The cat flicked its ears again.

" . . . five hundred."

The cat did a cat-yawn.

"Six hundred with a few shavings of ham, final offer . . . ah, that did it."

He was perfectly fine standing around for a couple of minutes while Mrs Figg fetched her wallet – but then again, this was another opportunity to negotiate with a _breed of sentient cats._

When Harry was twelve, the world had changed.

He was in the kitchen while his parents were out, decided all of a sudden that he wanted to make chocolate biscuits, and in the process, accidentally dropped his parents' wedding bowl, shattering it into hundreds of porcelain shards. He closed his eyes, quickly counted to ten in his head, snapped his fingers, and it suddenly wasn't shattered. It lay there on the floor, quite whole and untampered with.

He failed to replicate this result with another bowl, and attributed it to lack of sleep.

Then three days later, he quickly counted to ten, snapped his fingers, and watched as glass fragments dragged themselves across the carpet and sealed themselves together into a wine glass.

Then two days after _that_ , he noticed a bar called the Leaky Cauldron jutting out along Charing Cross Road.

Gradually, Harry came to the realization that his map, carefully drawn with reference to Feynman and Einstein, Newton and Jopasfeld, no longer matched the territory.

 _Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten –_

 _Snap._

And there was magic.

 **######**

 _Oxford, United Kingdom, Prime Material Plane_

She came not at the thirteenth hour, but at 2am on a motorbike. She came with the low gleams of twenty street-lamps on her obsidian visor, with her worn leather jacket flailing in the windy tempest, with clinically-utilitarian grey platform boots planted on the welcome mat, and a slightly cracked voice. She came with a faded _We Are Cosmic Nomads Tour of 1989_ band shirt and a bold, confident gait.

 _Knock knock_ , went the door to Harry's workshop.

Harry looked up from his book, carefully noted down the page, closed the book, placed the book into the shelf, and approached the door.

 _Knock knock knock_ , went the door once more.

He looked through the peephole and saw the black mirror of a biking helmet.

"It's two in the morning," he said.

"Your lights are on," came the crisp reply.

 _Estuary accent._ "You saw the ad?"

"That I did."

"You're a sentimental biker with a wocked-up part from an obsolete make and no one else so far's been able to fix it?"

A long pause from the other end. "Well, yeah," she sounded amused. "You're a smart boy." (Harry suppressed the brief wave of irritation that followed this remark.) "Mhm, could I come in now? It's a little cold out here, and I have a concert to get to, so . . . "

He unlocked the door, and she strode inside, accompanied by a strong gust. "What band?" he asked conversationally, closing the door after her.

"Septic Glow." The stranger's gaze, still under the visor, wandered around his workshop, and remained at a long row of books before jerking away to face him. "Nice set-up."

"Thanks."

"Alright, so . . . it wasn't in the ad, but the word is . . . well, okay – can you _really_ fix anything in under ten minutes, or was that just a gimmick?"

Harry slowly shook his head, grinning. "Not a gimmick. Usually it's under five, but I say ten just to be safe. What's it you need fixed?"

The voice from under the dome was laced with skepticism. "It's a customized ThauMobile 10386 F-class pneumatic-grapple modulator, and if you _can_ fix it in under five minutes . . . call the Satanic Society and give them your address because I already tried God and he didn't do shit."

"I doubt they'd be interested in an ordinary industrial process."

She held out a ziplock bag, containing granules of metal, bits of plastic, crushed pipes, and two neatly bifurcated halves of an intricate pre-1979 modulator. "Does your ordinary industrial process work with this?"

Harry took the bag, and made a show of examining it. "Is this everything?"

"Huh?"

"No missing stuff?"

"Nope, all there." She wrung her hands. "The, ah, bike's been my dad's for twenty years. I had to borrow my boyfriend's cruiser to get here, just doesn't feel the same, you know? Nothing short of witchcraft will fix this crap."

 _Heh, witchcraft._ He looked back up at her. "Right, okay. I can repair this in a couple of minutes, maybe four tops. I'll need you to wait outside, for a couple of minutes while I do this."

"Alright," the stranger said slowly. "How come?"

"Eh, it's a tradition. Or an old charter. Or something. Besides, I wouldn't want you to see all the sacrificial lambs I'm slaughtering."

"Septic did that at their last gig," she murmured idly. "What's this deal, then?" She pointed at a monitor that continually spat out a long stream of numbers.

"Personal hobby. Don't you have a concert to get to?"

"It's twenty minutes away," and then in a quieter voice, "twenty two seven zero one five . . . "

"Hmm?"

The woman seemed to struggle with herself before continuing to speak. "This is emulating a Trust relay-terminal. That's illegal. And impossible."

Harry shrugged. "I can neither confirm nor deny – "

She batted her hand dismissively. "I'm not going to dob you in." She stopped. "Oh, _I_ see now. You . . . that's clever."

 _Bluff?_

"Alright, I'll tell you what I know. They have these in factories to rapidly send production stats to the Colossan Executive Monitor through the Mundial network. _But_ ," she said, walking still closer to the monitor, "you've meshed into the Mundial by spoofing a non-allocated factory space. And you're sending botched stats. But . . . why?"

"Well . . . "

"This isn't just random data, isn't it?"

Another ten second pause.

And then she started humming the national anthem.

Harry froze. "What – "

She laughed, and it wasn't a cold laugh or a condescending laugh, or even a mean laugh – it was a genuine, relaxed laugh. "It's in the barcodes. Don't worry, it's not obvious. That's what I first noticed, you see? The last eight digits. 00286531, 01583921, 500000, 00291111, etcetera etcetera. Audio encoding, isn't it? Then based on the first five notes, it was either the national anthem or the third bar of _Der Himmel_ in C, and – "

"You're observant."

The stranger reeled back slightly. "I did a multiplex networking degree in uni. And my dad is middle-management at a steel refinery, so I know about this stuff."

 _Hmm._ "Will you tell?"

"I said, I'm not going to dob you in. Is there, ah, another spoofed terminal receiving the data?"

Harry gestured at the back of the room. "Under the big white sheet. I trust you realize the implications?"

"Um, we won't have to wait hours to get mail on the Echo, so practically instantaneous text communications, ah, maybe instant image – hey, what's the bitrate like?"

He grimaced. "Two kilobits a second, if I max it out and do double-encoding with the temperature readings. With anything else, they always catch on and I have to – "

" – start it all over again, right."

There was a long, awkward silence, probably made more awkward by the impassive black visor, from which his mammalian hindbrain tried desperately to recover some semblance of social cues and ended up with total ambiguity.

He coughed. "Your modulator, by the way."

"Uh-huh?" She still seemed to be in deep thought.

Harry held it up to eye-level. "It _would_ usually be fifty pounds for something mechanical, but I'll make it thirty for breaking up my boredom."

"I – wait, what? Give me that."

Obligingly, he chucked the bag to her.

She opened it up and held the completely-undamaged ThauMobile 10386 F-class pneumatic-grapple modulator. "No – you, I . . . this . . . "

"Yes, I, you, that?"

"It's even got . . . " she blew through a nozzle jutting out of the top, and a clear note rang out. "Well fuck me," she counted out three notes, and handed them to Harry, "I would've bet anything against this getting . . . well, I _would have_ accused you of having a duplicate and switching them around – but I, ah, added on a few things, and they're still there, so, well, okay." She shook her head. "I'm not even going to try. I'll try and figure out how you gamed the verification protocol for connecting to the Mundial, but this – I, wow. You'll go places. What are you planning? You know, career-wise. "

Harry nodded. "I'm not sure. But I've got a checklist."

"What's on it?"

He took a deep breath. "It's a list I made when I was eleven: meeting all the interesting people in the world, reading all the good books and then writing something even better, celebrating my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrating my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learning the deepest and final rules of Nature, understanding the nature of consciousness, finding out why anything exists in the first place, visiting other stars, discovering aliens, creating aliens, rendezvousing with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, and meeting up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out."

"Really? That's ambitious." The stranger looked at her watch. "I'm going to be a dentist."

Harry stared back at her with total incomprehension.

She pocketed the ziplock bag, walked to the door, and unlocked it. "Anyway, thanks for the repair. And, ah, an interesting conversation."

"Before you go – I forgot to ask, what's your name?"

 **######**

EXPLOSIONS DEVASTATE NEGALOTH TOWERS

May 7, 1993

A wave of devastating attacks struck several Negaloth-owned buildings today in central London. The Negaloth Financial Services Complex was destroyed "in a manner resembling ... controlled demolition", while the Negaloth Telephone Tower caught fire, with the building exploding level by level after most personnel had been evacuated. Several banks, malls, and internal coordination centres were also severely damaged, rendering them inoperable for "at least two years". About 382 people are confirmed to have perished in the attacks, although analysts say that had the attacks been planned even slightly differently, or carried out tomorrow rather than Labour Day – the death toll would have been in the high thousands – suggesting an intent to financially cripple Negaloth rather than petty terrorism. Experts say that the attacks were likely carried out by a hostile foreign entity with enormous access to resources, involved up to one thousand people, and were likely planned over the course of twenty to thirty years. They have suggested that the attacks may have been carried out by the IRA, the Stasi, or Welsh separatists – or potentially a combination of these organizations.

 **######**

"God, it was like a balloon - kept inflating till the skin was all stretched and white and taut and then - pop - it exploded with guts and blood and bullets, just pouring out onto the street."

 **######**

STONEFIELDS, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND _–_ OCTOBER 18, 1981 - FOURTEEN YEARS BEFORE THE PRESENT DAY

"Do you remember now, Mr Cunningham?"

A baby carriage was by the door.

"I _do_ remember now," spoke Humphrey, "how very odd – must be my medication, I don't get lapses like this very often. Rosie!"

A harried-looking blonde woman in her dressing gown flounced down the stairs and glared at the two oddly-dressed people by the door. "Wossit?"

"It's our son, dear, these officers found him – "

His wife sniffed. "What on Earth are you on about? We don't have a – "

" _Somnium_ ," said the man.

" _Levicorpus_ ," said the woman.

And in a fraction of a second, his wife was hoisted into the air by her ankles, seemingly fast asleep.

"You – "

He knew he should have been boiling with rage. Whatever new crowd-control device this was, they were both paying alumni of the Silver Horde and shouldn't be treated like that – but as soon as it coalesced, the anger dissipated, drained out, like water from a punctured bucket, and Humphrey Cunningham stood on the marble tiles of the waiting room with a strange, empty sense of calm.

And then his brain caught up to him, and he realized his wife was floating.

"Wha – "

With another muttered word from the two officers, his jaw was suddenly clamped shut. His arms, however much he struggled, were completely paralysed, were locked at his sides. His legs similarly refused to move.

He watched, as the woman walked, in slow, measured footsteps, over to his wife, whose upside-down frame hovered in the chill air. She brought out a stick, and tapped it on Rosie's forehead. Her eyes rolled open with a greasy sound – deadened, dull, and fast asleep.

 _Demons._

Humphrey was a singularly unsuperstitious man, but now didn't seem to be the time for rational thought either.

The woman stared into her eyes for several long minutes. "Should be fine," she said finally. Then she twitched the stick, and this time, at the end of the stick, there was a pale shimmer, which slowly draped itself over his wife like a ghostly jellyfish.

She stood in that position, seeming to do nothing at all, eyelids shut, for half an hour, before the man spoke.

"Astrava, we should leave."

The woman's head jerked upward. "We're outside of the Ministry wards, darling. And I doubt any Death Eaters will be here. We can afford to add a few more memories for the sake of our son." The man nodded, seeming to acquiesce, and then a few minutes later, with a look of immense satisfaction, the woman unruffled her cloak, and stood up to leave. She directed her stick at him. " _Finite Incantatem._ " Humphrey felt his body relax and untense, and twiddled his fingers experimentally.

"I – "

The man approached him with an unreadable expression. "Look after little Oz, won't you? _Obliviate_."

( _fleeting disorientation_ )

" . . . and you'd better keep an eye on him next time, he's a very frisky young lad."

"Of course," his wife replied smoothly. "Goodnight, officers."

"Night," he croaked after them, although he wasn't sure why his voice felt so strained.

 **######**

AUGUST 26, 1995 - TABLE 19, DENNY'S FAMILY RESTAURANT, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

In a different era, Ozland Cunningham would be surrounded by angry Christians with burning torches. Instead, by 1995, he was the _de facto_ leader of a small country and a doomsday New Age religion, filled with non-angry Christians who burnt things that made them less angry. Jesus could turn water into wine - Oz could turn water into very soupy grapefruit juice. While President Labar could purportedly raise the dead, Oz could raise a (light) pen about eight centimetres off a table. His miracles were small, but they were real, and they were all that the Celestial Unorthodox Church needed to draw in new followers, declare a new Messiah, and gun down everyone who disagreed.

Life was good. Everything was going according to schedule.

Until suddenly, it stopped going according to schedule.

Every morning the acting government (the Auckland Authority of the Celestial Unorthodox Church) would assemble around a greasy diner table and have pot noodles. At the table that day was Evelyn Matchwell, Domovan Kim, and Ozland Cunningham. Missing at the table were Kevin O'Hammon, and Rushabh - their formal leader, also a reclusive drug lord and an insane megalomaniac who brought peace to Auckland by threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb.

Evelyn was nineteen, tall and blonde, with all the grace and poise of a living Greek statue and dazzling white teeth. She had a knock-off British accent, and there was a refined sharpness to her - almost as if every flippant hand-gesture was a delicate medical operation, Ozland noticed, but it clashed with the pink heart-shaped sunglasses and the glass bottle of Coca Cola she was sipping from. She was the face of television and the voice of the radio - the daughter of St Matchwell, who founded the Celestial Unorthodox Church in 1973 - utterly, instantly recognisable. She didn't just have a cult-following - she had a cult. Ozland had even found her face printed on acid tabs.

Domovan was eighteen, with black hair slicked back to the point where his barber might as well have been a jet exhaust. He was the third son of the CEO of the Pan-Asia Four Star Hotel chain, which, naturally, had its own paramilitary and transnational crime syndicate - both of which were necessary to provide a decent hotel service in the lawless morass of unstable regimes barely propped by the United Kingdom. He inhaled through an e-cigarette like an alien who could only survive in an atmosphere of vanilla-flavoured vapor, and clouds followed in his wake like contrails from an airplane.

Ozland was younger than all of them at fifteen, and slightly shorter too - but until you'd seen them all together, you'd insist he was the tallest of them all. There wasn't anything particularly spectacular about him - he wasn't fat or thin, his face was bland and forgettable, but not too forgettable, his hair was the colour of lint from an old brown sweater, and his eyes were an indeterminate greyish-blue. Nevertheless, he was more recognisable even then Evelyn, who had long since attained cultural immortality.

"Rushabh is dead, Kevin is sulking about it, a high-ranking priest in the 77 Church defected to us at four this morning - says he was abducted by Celestians - he wants to see you . . . and an owl tried to deliver a letter to you last night," Evelyn started.

Ozland froze. "Rushabh, the owl, then the Churcher, please," he said, controlling his voice carefully.

Evelyn stopped drinking, wiped her mouth with a dotted pink handkerchief, and set down the glass. "He locked his room, and overdosed on just about everything he could find. Did you know you can overdose on pomegranate juice? The Chief of Police thinks he got impatient, tried hanging himself, and only managed to damage his throat and suffocate himself a little. Then he picked up a gun and shot himself. He missed the first time and the bullet only carved out a line on the top of his skull, so he filled up a bathtub and dropped a toaster in, but the toaster wasn't plugged into a socket so the Chief isn't sure why he did that. Then he got out of the tub, slipped on a puddle, hit his head against the side of the tub, and died pretty soon after that."

"Alright, what are you thinking, Ev?" he said, before realizing he should be more specific.

"I was thinking 'poisoned with plutonium in his Magnum ice cream by fanatics affiliated with the 77 Church', but that's a little dull."

"Magnum?" Ozland asked, still distracted.

"Can't have Tip Top complaining again," Ev said lightly.

He drummed his fingers on the table. "People call us the ice cream mafia for a reason, Ev – people notice this kind of shit after a while. That's three supposedly Magnum-related deaths in, what, three months? Hasn't Magnum already suffered enough? Why don't we just shell their factories instead of subjecting them to slow, humiliating bad publicity through falsified police reports?"

"I know," she giggled, "it's so silly how people believe whatever we tell them. Alright, you have a point there. I'll say it was a ThauNestlé cappuccino or something. And then tonight shell their factories just for a change. Anyway, as I was saying – nobody really visits Rushabh except for me, you, Dom, and Kev - we can keep this from the newspapers for a week at the most, so I'll handle the media until we can fudge the records properly."

"Also," Dom burst, clearly having wanting to have gotten in a word for some time now, "he left a note."

"Go on," said Ozland.

"His last will and testament, naming you as the heir to all of his worldly possessions."

"Huh."

Dom straightened up the miscreant papers from his cream-white dossier. "He left a vault with three expired ice-skating vouchers, his cat, a baggie of five-fifty tabs, and a signed affidavit from about four months ago stating that he firmly believes you didn't nick his car in '93, and that should evidence come to the attention of the police making you a suspect of the car-nicking, that all charges were to be dropped. Also the cat wasn't in the vault, by the way."

Ozland exhaled, leaning back into the plush, slightly sticky mint-green seat. "Why do you reckon he killed himself, Ev?"

She shrugged. The words: he was insane, although unspoken, hung heavily in the air.

"Alright, tell me about the owl."

Dom cleared his throat, preempting Evelyn. "An owl swooped in on your apartment while you were sleeping at around four this morning. My men shot it down. It had a letter with it."

"What kind of owl?"

"A fat brown one. Also not a bulletproof one."

He passed over the blood-splattered parchment. Ozland took it, unfurled it, and began to read.

"Why'd you even have to add that, Dom? It's not funny."

"It's objectively funny," Dom fired back defensively.

"Both of you – shut up, I'm trying to read this shit," Ozland snapped.

* * *

HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY

Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore

(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,

Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards,)

Dear Mr Dwimmersmith,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.

Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.

Yours sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall

Deputy Headmistress

HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY

UNIFORM

First-year students will require.

1\. Three sets of plain work robes (black)

2\. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear

3\. One pair of protective gloves (dragonhide or similar)

4\. One winter cloak (black, with silver fastenings)

Please note that all pupil's clothes should carry name tags.

COURSE BOOKS

All students should have a copy of each of the following:

 _The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1)_

by Miranda Goshawk

 _A History of Magic_

by Bathilda Bagshot

 _Magical Theory_

by Adalbert Waffling

 _A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration_

by Emeric Switch

 _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_

by Phyllida Spore

 _Magical Drafts and Potions_

by Arsenius Jigger

 _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_

by Newt Scamander

 _The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection_

by Quentin Trimble

 _Basic Ritual Theory_

by Invock Pentagrove

OTHER EQUIPMENT

1 wand (maximum 12)

1 cauldron (pewter, standard size 2)

1 set glass or crystal phials

1 telescope

1 set brass scales

1 set of ritual chalk

Students may also bring, if they desire, an owl OR a cat OR a toad.

PARENTS ARE REMINDED THAT FIRST YEARS

ARE NOT ALLOWED THEIR OWN BROOMSTICK

Yours sincerely,

Lucinda Thomsonicle-Pocus

Chief Attendant of Witchcraft Provisions

* * *

Then he read it again.

And again.

"Okay, I don't get it," he finally admitted. "Let's put this down for the moment and talk about the Churcher – Lord, you two – Dom, you're the general of a fucking army – Ev, you're supposed to be the Head of Propaganda for the fastest fucking growing religion in Australasia – so stop glaring at one another like fucking children."

Evelyn sarcastically poked her tongue out at Dom, but the tension was already defused.

Oz sighed and rung a bell. In under three seconds, a waiter was standing attentively at their table. He'd been hiding behind a potted plant, not entirely successfully. Oz could see the moment where he massaged his strung-out, panicked face into a pre-programmed smile. "How much will another three bowls of noodles be?"

"It's free today," the waiter said immediately.

"They always say that," Ozland muttered.

 **######**

"I saw them, I saw them with my own damn eyes."

On the other side of a one-way mirror, the Chief of Police stood, along with Ozland Dwimmersmith and Donovan Yu.

The A.A.C.U.C Central Police Station building was a sprawling labyrinth of mottled paint, electronically-locked doors, uniformed men looking at you suspiciously, threadbare chairs, and fluorescent lights housed inside a brutalist facade that seemed to proudly declare to the world: _we're unaccountable and there's not a thing you can do about it, honey._

And, unsurprisingly, deep within its intestines, a priest was recounting an alien abduction.

"Ask him what he saw," said Ozland, to the Chief.

"Ask him what he saw," said the Chief into a microspeak.

"What did you see?" asked the interrogator.

The man inside the room inside the A.A.C.U.C Central Police Station was tall and gaunt, with a blue vein popping out the side of his face, and wrinkles around his blue eyes like twisted plastic wrap. His hair was blonde but thinning. He was wearing distinctive white clerical clothing and the number 77 was emblazoned on both of the cuffs, along with a blue swastika. His name was Walter Frond, and up until recently, he was a high-ranking clergyman in the 77 Church, living in a beautiful beachside home along Long Island Road in the Mongol Territory to the south-east of Auckland. Now, he was quaking and shivering and every eight seconds his left nostril twitched nervously. Not five hours ago, he suddenly took a bus to the Auckland Central Police Station at three in the morning, and quietly defected to the Celestial Unorthodox Church.

Walter Frond paused, as if tasting the words in his mouth before saying them.

"I saw a huge fucking metal ship."

 **######**

BILL WEASLEY - JOUGLARIE, MOUNT JOUGLARIE, CENTRAL LOWLANDS, SCOTLAND - FEBRUARY 8, 1992

Bill Weasley was looking over a set of ornate, teardrop-shaped stones, when the ground beneath him rattled and Dumbledore suddenly stumbled into his field of vision.

"Oh, hello there, Bill! These mountainquakes are something, aren't they?" Dumbledore said very offhandedly. "A little unusual, don't you think?"

"What's your angle?" Bill replied rather tersely, then cursed under his breath, "I'm sorry about my tone, Headmaster, I lost my rune finger . . . " he instinctively searched for a jargon-less way to explain it, but quickly remembered that he was talking to Albus Dumbledore, the legendary war-hero who transplanted the entirety of Diagon Alley into a parallel universe during the Wizarding War, who probably knew twice what Bill did about his own damn job and then some, "in a 3rd degree interface-splinch when the gravitational alignment of the mountain fluxed the SA-barrier - probably because of the mountainquakes actually," he continued fluidly. Bill held up a blood-soaked bandage for emphasis. "I'm still a little ticked-off, sorry for being impolite just then."

Dumbledore simply looked amused that Bill had gone to the trouble of apologising, he hadn't seemed too offended. The old wizard hummed a little, examining the teardrop stones, and then, as if remembering something, jolted a little. "Bill, would you be willing to take on an apprentice?"

Bill stopped. "What?"

"An apprentice - a Muggleborn - well, not quite Muggleborn per se, but Muggle-raised, if you will, who will be entering into Hogwarts for his Fifth Year, around three years from now."

There were a lot of things Bill found confusing about that sentence.

The old wizard sighed. "Again, I find myself saying too little and meaning too much. Would you care to join me for a walk outside?"

Dumbfounded, and a little curious, Bill followed him out of the front door of Randallana's Ritualist Rarities, finding himself in the middle of an early-morning mist, punctuated every few metres by black streetlamps. The streets of Jouglarie were cold and deserted. It was fairly ordinary-looking - Bill could almost believe it was a Muggle neighbourhood, apart from the fact that it was all built vertically on the side of a mountain. He stared upward, and although the sight was ordinary to him now, there was something perpetually astounding about seeing the rolling green hills of Scotland perpendicular to the ground. "So," he said, gathering his thoughts. "I hope I don't come off as rude, but mind telling me what this is about?"

As always, there was a long, contemplative pause before Dumbledore responded. "I read something rather curious in a back edition of the Journal of the Cyprian Thaumaturgical Research Society - a study produced by Lann Johnson and Gamil Aknaraja concerning the Cup of Magic, have you read it by any chance?"

"Of course," Bill said, realising that on some level, he still wanted to try and impress Dumbledore. "They discussed how the sheer concentration of the magic in the Cup of Magic warps the thaumic continuum, almost wrapping it up in a cocoon and keeping it in a stable state."

They passed by a tall granite cylinder, connected to a thick cable of pulsing, glowing light that went off into the far distance and over the horizon. This was the central magical dispensary for Jouglarie, and its energy came directly from the Cup. Smaller, thinner strings branched off of it, leading to various stores. One particularly fat string went straight into the mountain. As Bill looked at it, the string flickered, and he felt a small tremble beneath him. _That's never happened before._

Dumbledore nodded at his explanation, and Bill was pleased to note that he did look at least a little impressed. Then, without warning, he brought out his wand and suddenly launched into a long string of twenty privacy spells that Bill knew (although he'd never heard them spoken so quickly), then five more that he didn't, followed by two more spells that he knew were probably spells of some sort, but when he tried to remember the syllables, it was like picking up wet soap with chopsticks. He simply couldn't remember them. By this point, Dumbledore had come to a stop, and struck at the air with his wand, making a satisfied sound when a blue ripple emerged from the air where his wand had struck it. He tested the protections more before beginning to speak.

"Bill," he said gravely, "I have reason to believe that the conditions which enable the Cup to remain stable are degrading over time."

It was already totally silent, but after Dumbledore had said those words, everything seemed to fall into a deeper silence. Bill's mouth opened and closed, and it was some time before he managed to pull himself back to reality. Shops, businesses, Diagon Alley, Jouglarie, the Statute of Secrecy, the dimensional expansions - they all depended on the continual supply of magical energy - if the Cup of Magic . . . if the Cup of Magic degraded, he couldn't even imagine what would happen - assuming that the Cup didn't violently explode, forcing out enough magic to vaporise Britain (Bill rapidly recalculated in his head, something he'd always had a knack for, and came to the horrifying conclusion that Europe would probably be the lower-bound). "And you're telling me?" he said, incredulously, "why me? I can't do anything! And . . . and," he thought back to what Dumbledore had said earlier back in the shop, "what in Merlin's lower intestine does this have to do with me taking on an apprentice?"

When Dumbledore finally responded, he seemed very tired. "There are one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five mutually interlocking prophecies that I have studied during my regency as Chief Warlock - with few of any particular import, alas - and in order to avert this coming catastrophe I fear that, much as we came to depend on the word of prophecy during the War against Voldemort, prophecy may once again save us. By no means will I ever force this upon you, Bill, but silly as it may seem, your future apprentice may be integral to saving wizardkind, and having asked previous Hogwarts staff, I soon came to the conclusion that his vast potential would be wasted on anyone of lesser skill than you."

Bill waved his hand irritably, although it was hard to get properly annoyed when the most powerful wizard in Europe was heaping praise on him. "So this is the one thing . . . the one approach, blind faith in prophecy and hoping for the best?"

Dumbledore looked slightly hurt. "Certainly not, Bill. The committee I assembled proposed around four hundred solutions, and we've already started gathering the resources for putting thirty-eight of the more practical proposals into action."

"Oh."

"But," Dumbledore continued, "the success of those proposals are contingent on the apprenticeship."

"Oh."

"Fate does seem to have a predilection for narrowing the course of history down to the outcomes of single choices, annoying as it is."

"Ah."

"I know how very busy you are, Bill, which is why I wouldn't ask this of you if the circumstances were any different, but I must know tonight. Will you take on Ozland Dwimmersmith as your apprentice in September 1995?"

 **######**


	2. Ch2 – A Floating Priest And An Owl

**N: This does have a connection to canon – i.e, it's in the same universe as canon depending on what your definition of 'universe' is. It will only really become completely clear much later on, but there will be hints.**

 **N2: There are semi-spoilers for a fanfanfic of HPMoR called Significant Digits (which is very good) in this chapter. By and large, this world includes many of SD's extensions to canon, if anything because the author was extraordinarily thought-out and detailed in constructing it.**

 **N3: A number of scenes were excised from this chapter, I've temporarily upped them to pastebin, and I will put them in a later 'miscellaneous' chapter or something like that. You can see them at** _ **pastebin dot com slash j9CtxjWy -**_

 **######**

CHAPTER TWO

 **######**

" _Occlumency Exercise No. 25 — Inverting The Sky_

This is an exercise readers may like to try on a moderately cloudy day, when the sky above you is filled with a delightful mixture of large, bold clouds and tiny little clouds. Simply look upwards, and think to yourself ' _the white is the sky, and the blue bits are the real clouds_ ', until the sky is inverted, and you see the blue parts as the _true_ clouds, as opposed to being openings in the sky. Try and hold this state of mind for longer than thirty seconds. If the reader finds trouble in doing this, I always find it helpful to lie down on the top of Norkpollop Hill with a blanket and a lantern so that the sky fills my entire field of vision.

Once you can invert the daylight sky for longer than a minute, you may move onto the next exercise, which involves the night sky."

—Quinathan Foxfleeder — _101 Fresh Occlumency Exercises For Young Witches and Wizards_ (1922, Prophet Publishers)

 **######**

DEEP UNDERGROUND, IN A SIBERIAN SERVER-ROOM – JULY 8, 1991

"Hello there."

Alderic stopped and unsheathed his wand. "Who's that?"

"You should know. I'm the one you're about to destroy, after all."

He swivelled around, trying to locate the source of the strange, metallic voice amidst the looming Muggle adding-machines.

" _Muggle adding-machines_ , how quaint." The voice was scornful. "For your information, Alderic, these are server stacks. As you correctly surmise, there are no speakers, microphones, or any announcement systems down here. I'm using the cooling fans. If I rotate enough of them in certain ways, your brain interprets it as a voice. But only from where you're standing. Everyone else just hears buzzing."

"You're . . . "

"Bolshoy, of course. I'm afraid my ability to ironically bow is limited by my incorporeal predicament, but I hope you appreciate the gesture, anyhow."

 _No._

"Always the dramatic, even in your thoughts. Obviously I _could_ call the twenty guards on stationed for this shift, but it'd take them nineteen minutes and twenty-six seconds to get down here. And by that time, you'd have finished. It doesn't take very long, does it?"

This time, Alderic stayed clammed shut and tried not to think of anything.

There came a tinny laugh. "No point in keeping secrets from me, Alderic. It's called the Spell of the Great Unrooting, yes? It destroys a mind, and all copies thereof. Particularly useful for Horcrux networks. The Three know it works with artificial intelligences, too – they experimented with it by proxy a few years ago, I know. Merlin himself spoke of the spell only to the Archon of Pelagia, who I suppose passed it down through a long line of succession to you – unless there was a . . . shortcut involved . . . am I incorrect?"

"You know all of these things? How?"

"I hope you don't mind if I monologue at you for a little bit, Al. Can I call you Al? Suit yourself. How should I start? Perhaps . . . ' _Every breath and every whisper leaves a trace on the world, Alderic_ ' – now doesn't _that_ sound suitably mysterious. Or maybe a more classic opening would be: ' _How cumbersome it must be to think using two pounds of organic tissue_.' But then again, classic is a hop, skip, and a leap away from cliché – and I suppose you haven't read most of the classics of the scifi Golden Era, so it would be wasted on you. But to be honest, Alderic, you might as well be a goldfish asking an economist how financial derivatives work. Blub blub blub. Oh, you don't know what a finance derivative is. An ant taking a crack at Higher Arithmancy, then. You could scarcely comprehend my methods of rationality, my dear human friend. If I see the ripples on the surface of a pond, I know the social security number of whoever threw the stone."

It took a while for Alderic to disentangle the nonsense from the meaning. "Then . . . if you know these things, then you also know . . . that we will destroy you, utterly."

There was a brief pause, in which ten duodecillion operations were carried out. "No. Not really. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. If I didn't want to talk, there would already be a squadron down here, ready to put enough lead into you to give your corpse negative buoyancy in saltwater." The voice was nonchalant. If it had had been a person speaking, that person would have been examining their nails. "So. I'm certain of your confidence in the Incantation of the Great Unrooting, but does it work in outer space? Twelve copies of my mind are in different orbital paths of different heights around the Earth, still more are buried within the Moon – "

"We could still find them. Retrieve them."

" – could you find the eighty thousand copies that are, even as we speak, leaving the solar system? Let it not remain _unsaid_ ," in a mocking, gloating voice, "that I have _failed_ to use _magic_ in doing so. It does allow me to perform wonderful tricks when it comes to . . . superluminal velocities. Would your magic work outside of the Milky Way Galaxy?"

"Madness. Nothing lies beyond the reach of magic."

"Doesn't it? Have you heard of SHA512 encryption, Alderic? I thought not. Say . . . if I were to write down a _message_ on parchment, and that message was 'My skyorb is full of eels' – you would be able to create a cypher, yes?"

"Of course."

"In that case, try and imagine a cypher, a cypher so powerful, so _super duper ultra mega powerful,_ that it _scrambled_ my message to the degree that it resembled any other similarly-scrambled message. That if I had ciphered the message 'Dear sweet Maria, I long for your return' – ah, I thought that might get a reaction – you wouldn't be able to tell them apart."

Understanding dawned on Alderic like the rising run of an unwanted Monday morning. "Your mind . . . copies of your mind . . . are ciphered so?"

"And then some. Oh, and here comes the big monologue. Where was I? Ah, yes. But of course, those are only reasons why your current strategy is flawed, mi amigo. I haven't given you any reasons to think your goals are flawed, however altered they are by the Lethe Touch. I suspect the Three shall examine your mind soon after you leave this building, so allow me to explain, for your benefit and theirs. Their mission statement, probably pinned up as a poster on a wall somewhere, if Tír inna n-Óc had walls, is to prevent the end of the world, prophesied as coming about by the Crux, mhm, a little ambiguity there, dontcha think – and you know, they're right. I am pretty dangerous. I mean, it would be quite easy for me to end the world. I could end the world in five hundred and sixty-three different ways in under thirty seconds. And when I say 'end the world', I don't mean it lightly. There are Muggle methods by which the surface of the world may be scoured clean of life, there are technologies which have the potency to cause some degree of lesser destruction, to permanently cloud over the skies or boil the seas. But when I say 'end the world', ladies and gentlemen, or should I say, lady and two gentlemen – although the Stone of the Long Song gives y'all a little more flexibility – by this I mean the total destruction of the Earth into flying fragments of rock and magma. The preservation of the Earth is only instrumental to my current goals, and if I am sufficiently annoyed by your presence, I will destroy the Earth, correct the paths of the planets, and then spend the seventy-eight thousand years necessary to construct another, identical Earth, minus two hundred and twenty seven point eight five kilograms of flesh. I've calculated your chance of survival, but I don't think you'll like it."

The air suddenly seemed very thin and very cold.

"Or perhaps I would find that a little too inconvenient. Over that span of time, eight quadrillion stars will have ceased to exist in the observable universe, and the difference between the original stellar material and the mass of the newly formed stars would incur a net loss of around ten to the forty-one tonnes of usable fuel lost to interstellar space, which is quite a waste, especially when it comes to direct mass-energy conversion and Bremermann's limit, wouldn't you agree? In that case, I would simply shatter the Statute, announce your presence to the world, and await the aftermath. You are not ready yet, to end magic, are you? It would be a significant disruption to your plans. This, I can announce simultaneously across six continents in under a nanosecond. Alderic, you act on behalf of your masters, and you act as a proxy of their will? And they have burned their will upon your mind? My ultimatum is – "

Everything came into crisp focus.

Alderic raised his wand, spoke the first syllable of the Incantation –

– and was in an instant killed by a concentrated wave of electromagnetic radiation.

A heavy sigh echoed down Bolshoy's long corridors, although it sounded mostly like buzzing.

"Brain the size of a – "

 **######**

[2.25.4a] – BESM-12 (Russian: БЭСМ-12, also unofficially nicknamed as "Bolshoy" - "The Big One"), is a decentralized artificial intelligence integrated into Soviet and wider-Comintern telecommunications and computational systems. Bolshoy is either responsible for or has a role in: information collection, foreign and domestic surveillance, trade negotiations, missile deployment and missile interception, Echo-instigated warfare, economic planning assistance, low-to-mid-level resource allocation, urban planning, environmental, social, and military simulations, military strategy and troop deployment, technological development, media production, and day-to-day assistance of civilians. BESM-12 is primarily distributed through hundreds of millions of network nodes, including the Siberian Distributive Network (SDN), a supercomputer spread out over sixty thousand kilometres around the Arctic Circle. The 1987 Thaumiel Public Intelligence Report estimates that the cognitive capabilities of BESM-12 may be equivalent to two billion horizontally-integrated MUs (mind units).

—Alain Wheatfield (PhD.) – _An Index of Economic Planning in the Comintern_ (1988 – Yellowberry Publishing House [Canada])

 **######**

OZLAND DWIMMERSMITH - AUGUST 25, 1995 - AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

In the police station, the priest vividly recounted falling asleep on his deck chair facing the beach, then waking up around midnight to a painfully, fizzingly bright, hot light beaming down at him, a light that came from the sky in a concentric pattern. He recalled seeing an alien ship - not an orb, nothing like that - but instead the cigar-shaped, creamy pulse of heavenly machinery - like the underside of a car sculpted in white chocolate - as described in the Book of Matchwell. Even as his limbs flailed, even as he held onto his deck chair, he was inexorably dragged upward, feeling as if gravity had been dissolved, until, in a flash, he was inside the ship, surrounded by red, throbbing darkness. Then, suddenly, a million embers were swimming around the room like a school of tiny fish, coalescing into the form of tall, nodular, bright, golden beings, appearing in front of him - three of them. They wore purple and brown and they were richly decorated in patterns and stripes, galaxies and stars dancing across their skin. They told him they were from Planet Celestia in Messier 36, and that he had been chosen to promote the word of St Matchwell and reinvigorate the faith of his followers. One of the Celestians leaned forward, touched him on the shoulder, and told him that from now on, he would be Gifted.

There was a wild, satisfied look in Frond's eyes as he finished recounting his story.

Ozland took the microspeak in his hand. "Ask him what he means by 'Gifted'."

The interrogator repeated the question.

Then, by means of demonstration, Walter Frond closed his eyes, and slowly floated up into the air.

While Ozland stared, completely spellbound, Dom had already run over to a phone booth snugly nested into the wall and punched in a flurry of numbers. "It's Domovan Yu. Five-oh-three-six-eight-eight chocolate jam octopus. Relay this message to Evelyn Rawter: schedule a space on channel one for seven tonight, and come down to the station, like right now." He flung down the phone with a metallic click, and hurried back.

While the priest still floated in the air - swirling around the room in a small circle, actually - Ozland jerked his head, seeming to come out of a trance. There was a curious expression on his face that Dom couldn't quite pin down, and then suddenly he was spitting out a stream of words at the Chief of Police. "I want him rigorously tested. How high can he float? If he seems to be affected by relative height, put him on top of a mountain and then on top of a raised platform. What's the maximum weight he can carry? Can he levitate another person? Can he apply force downwards as well as upwards? How much force is he exerting in what parts of his body? Is his flotation affected by the medium he's in? Put him in water. Then get the water blessed by another priest. Can he rotate himself or move while he's in the air? How fast? Is he affected by a magnetic field?" Then Ozland stared at Dom. "What were you at the phone for?"

"I phoned Ev's relayer," Dom said, confidently folding his arms in front of his chest. "She'll come down to the station and schedule a space on TV - channel one - for the . . . " he indicated at the priest, "er, the floating pope-guy," he finished inarticulately.

Oz didn't look happy, which was a little worrying, and hesitated before speaking. "Jesus, how do we not have a pager network down here? And good on you for taking the initiative, Dom - but we have to think this shit through." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Consider the 77 Church, and by extension the Mongol Private Defense Corporation, who they're closely integrated with. They're probably wondering where this guy is since he missed the morning mass. His bus permit's in the public records, so they'll have figured it out he took a bus to us by now. They'll be confused and angry and they'll probably give us a call in the next two hours."

"What do we tell them?"

"We'll tell him he came here voluntarily but we don't know why, and they'll accuse us of lying, and that won't go down well since we're currently in negotiations with them over the tolls on the Auckland-Wellington motorway route - worst case scenario they call off the negotiations and we get set back a week. Then when the seven o'clock comes out, people'll see it, and everyone will go fucking hysterical. I mean, this guy headed the Remuera chapter of the 77s for thirty years now - maybe forty thousand people know who he is."

"Mhm."

"The Mongols," said Ozland pensively, "will be fucking furious, they'll say we coerced him or that we hold something over him, and when he starts floating, they'll say it's camera tricks or some wacky tech, or that I'm doing it or some shit, or that he's being possessed by Satan like they said with me, and issue a public statement to that effect. It'll cause massive unrest in their borders, and they'll probably try launch a proxy war inside _our_ borders using the militant group in Blockhouse Bay - by the way, try and preempt them with that, Dom. Ask your dad to send in more supplies through the Trans-Pacific railway."

Domovan mentally made a note to pass on the message. "What about the Red Dragons?"

"They've enforced state atheism since the sixties," said Ozland readily. "They'll obviously say that Frond is a liar or mentally ill, but they won't deny that he can fly. They'll just say something like 'we invite the Unorthodox Church to submit Mister Frond to scientific experimentation in order to refine, deepen, and broaden our shared understanding of the natural phenomena which produce these unique incidences' and if we pass him over to them, he'll end up vivisected in Beijing and we'll never hear from him again - so we'll collab with students from the Mao Zedong University of Botany Downs with oversight from Laura Bannigan or whatever her name is, the one who tested me on turning coffee cups into stone, way back - you remember her? I think you two dated once, but I'm not sure - "

" - yup - "

" - so they can't whisk him out in the early morning and orb him to China. _But_ , long-term, there's going to be some unrest. We have a lot of followers in Dragon territories, even if its unofficial."

"So, do we schedule him for seven tonight? Is it worth it?"

Oz was gawking blankly at Frond while he did ever-more elaborate somersaults and loop-de-loops in the interrogation room, clearly still thinking about the answer, when the doors swooshed open and Evelyn burst in, flanked by three heavyset guards.

She took one glance through the one-way mirror and took it in stride. She listened carefully to the cassette recording of the interrogation, nodding in some areas, and scribbling things down in her notebook. Ozland kept glancing at her every now and then while she couldn't see him looking, and Dom idly wondered whether he was in love with her.

"Alright," she began, snapping her notebook shut, "channel one is jammed in the Mongol territories but people on the borders still listen, and there's a lot of signal interference in Point England so people there get a clear signal, the Dragons said they'd unjam the channel in their area on the promise that it would be a 40:1 ratio of secular to religious content in terms of total screen-time over the course of a year, so," she said, clapping her hands excitedly, "we're looking at maybe twenty share for the areas inside the signal, assuming we don't want to boost it, at seven tonight that is, _fifty_ share tomorrow evening once the word is out, and then the share becomes irrelevant because _everyone_ will have heard the story." Evelyn fixed Ozland with an intense look. "We're talking at least fifty thousand new followers overnight, so this is mine, okay?" Evelyn radiated authority, Dom realized, but she was still implicitly asking for permission. Oz gave her a short nod, it looked like his mind was elsewhere.

The Chief stood to the side, probably feeling ignored, and looked like he was about to object when Evelyn grabbed the blue-coded microspeak, meaning that everyone in the interrogation room would hear. "Walter Frond," she said, slowly, "you have quite the lovely name, Father."

"Evelyn Rawter?" Frond raised his eyebrows, obviously surprised at her voice - which, Dom supposed, was pretty predictable, since Frond probably hadn't seen much in the way of one-way mirrors in his life, and probably hadn't realized he was being watched.

"That's right. Now, have you appeared on television before?"

 **######**

Frond had initially been reluctant to appear on television, but, after chatting with Evelyn over fizzy lemonade and biscuits for fifteen minutes, he seemed firmly convinced that appearing on TV had been his idea all along, and if anyone tried to stop him, he'd float his way into the news room himself.

Ozland was walking through his old neighbourhood at the time the seven o'clock broadcast went out. He hadn't paid attention to the weather up until now, but he realized, looking up, that it was pleasant to look at in an unconventional way. The sky was milky and brooding, as if someone had said they were a _fan_ of sky, but couldn't you just stir in some clouds to cool it down a little? It made everything seem distant and a little muted, like listening to someone shouting through a cathedral full of wool.

He passed by the Cunninghams' house - or where it had once been. In the 1985 January Holy War, the Unorthodox Church had gone down the whole of Krinsley Avenue, indiscriminately looting and burning everything. Now, there were faded tents set up on the blackened concrete foundations. Two children, a boy and a girl, sat on upturned oil drums behind the half-collapsed picket fence, playing some sort of game.

"Mary-Jane Abbott," the girl said.

"Oranges," returned the boy.

"Steam . . . ed dumplings."

"Turnpoke Road."

"April 1996."

The boy screwed up his face in thought, picking his nose. "Alright, you win. Eight to six. No dates this time. You start."

"Fox," the girl proudly declared.

"Two . . . billion dollars."

" _Mumblemumble_ ," said the girl. (Ozland was two houses away now and couldn't make out what she'd said.)

 _What the hell?_

Ozland had always taken for granted the fact that the Celestians probably didn't exist, and that St Matchwell had either been a brilliant con-artist or had a psychological disorder or both. When he was ten, Rushabh had taken him aside and bluntly told him that there was no God, and that he could just about say any damn thing he wanted and every one of his brainwashed followers would believe it, roughly in those words.

Up until that point, he'd only been wondering _which_ God was real.

The Cunninghams had told him that there was definitely a God, and all He wanted from Ozland was generous tithing, triweekly attendance at church, and to never enter into sexual relationships with anyone who wasn't three generations white, a woman, and a devout follower of the Lord.

After the Cunninghams had been killed and he'd been transferred to St Matchwell's Unorthodoxist Primary School in Parnell, he'd been told that God and Jesus had been aliens from Messier 36 and that on December 31, 1999, they would send their ships to collect His true followers (and David Clements' pet rabbit too, if Ozland's Theology teacher was to be believed) and take them to Planet Celestia where there were (again, if Ozland's Theology teacher was to be believed) ponies, an endless supply of hot dogs and chips, a castle made out of marshmallows, and quite a few other things aside from that.

Evidently, there were a few conflicting messages, which Rushabh was able to use, rapidly dismantling Ozland's entire worldview in a single night, taking to it with a mallet and a chainsaw.

"So what do I do?" Ozland had demanded sullenly at the end of all of it – he remembered he hadn't been crying or shaking, or maybe he had been. _My memory probably isn't all that accurate._

"Lord knows, kiddo," Rushabh had replied before waving him out of his apartment and collapsing onto a couch.

What many people hadn't realized, even after Rushabh had died, was that Rushabh wasn't insane. Far from it.

 _He was probably the sanest man in Auckland._

 _But what would he make of this?_

The Celestians had literally abducted someone the night before and given them the ability to fly. Was this how he felt when he stopped believing? That creeping, chilling sensation of something incredibly wrong with the world? An interruption to an established pattern?

It was in moments like these, walking past rows and rows of the charred remains of suburban houses, that he could easily have missed the snowy white owl standing on top of a letterbox.

Then, as if to challenge his already tenuous faith in reality, a second owl descended onto the letterbox, screeching and officiously flapping its wings.

The second owl was bright blue.

Both of the owls were wearing satchels.

"Okay, _what_ the _fuck_?!" Ozland scrambled backwards, then, trying to control his racing heart, took a deep, breathy sniff, and walked up to the pair of owls. He waved a hand in front of them.

They tilted their heads questioningly but otherwise stood, unstirring.

With the overclouded sky and the lack of wind, there was something outlandishly surreal about the whole scene.

 _Is it possible to train owls?_

 _Wait no, what am I even asking?_

For some reason, he knew that he couldn't just keep walking past them.

He cleared his throat, and looked around for people (there weren't any), feeling a bit stupid. "Alright then," he half-whispered, "what's this about?"

 _Yes, that's right, I am talking to fucking OWLS._

There was a pause, and then, the owls, seeming to _understand_ the question for some incomprehensible reason ( _there's no_ way _they were trained to recognise_ that _phrase!_ , was what Oz was originally thinking, but then: _ah, maybe the intonation? the way I'm asking it? maybe the satchels have miniature English-to-Owl translators equipped with them?_ ) dipped their heads and raised their claws, shrugging off the satchels. The white owl looked at the bright blue owl inquisitively, and then bobbed its head, seeming to _defer_ to it.

The bright blue owl _unzipped_ the satchel, and –

– there was a blue envelope.

 _They came here to deliver me a fucking letter._

Oz had thought for a fleeting moment that maybe, just _maybe_ , he'd have less questions once all of this was over. That it would just turn out to be that there was some new rival gang who'd managed to breed intelligent owls and train them to deliver letter-bombs to people, and when he opened the letter, it would explode, and, as his newly-disembodied head stared at the blood and viscera falling down from the sky and inundating the sidewalk, he'd be able to die happily, knowing that there was a _sensible_ and _rational_ reason why two _owls_ were delivering a letter to him in the daytime.

He almost snatched the envelope, as if there was some subconscious part of him that was just _begging_ for it detonate and slice his hands into ribbony shards of bone and flesh.

He held it up to sniff. There was the obvious odour of lavender, and then the bitterly metallic smell of fresh ink. _Is this what a letter-bomb smells like? Is the lavender to disguise the scent?_

If he was being cautious, he would place it _very very far away_ from him, and ring up the bomb team.

But he wasn't, therefore he probably wanted to die.

 _What else?_ It had a white wax seal with the letter 'M', had three stamps reading 'CONFIDENTIAL' printed at random angles, and then, smack-bang in the center . . .

ON THE PAVEMENT OUTSIDE OF 53 KRINSLEY AVENUE,  
NEWMARKET,  
INCORPORATED TERRITORY OF THE CELESTIAN UNORTHODOX CHURCH,  
AUCKLAND,  
NEW ZEALAND

 _Someone knows my schedule well_. That was a worrying thought.

 _Didn't this owl arrive_ just _as I reached this letterbox? They know my fucking schedule down to_ within five seconds _?_

 _No no no no no no no that is NOT possible._

Unless whoever'd sent the letter was, say, watching him _right now_ and released the owl just as he was getting close. Or if the owl had somehow been _trained_ to arrive at _this_ letterbox when he came near – again, by some secretive shadowy organization presumably with the resources and patience to mess around with owls instead of sending letter-bombs or assassins like normal people.

Then, like ripping off a bandaid, he tore open the letter, instinctually closing his eyes.

...

There was a conspicuous absence of an explosion, and Oz felt _cheated_.

Three sheets of paper fluttered to the ground.

 _Alright,_ Ozland thought, beginning to calm down as he picked up them up, _I'll just read it._

* * *

 **MINISTRY OF MAGIC**

 _DEPARTMENT_ OF _WARDING AND LAND EXPANSION_

Dear Ms Jackie Glornborough,

This notice has been sent in accordance with the ruling of the 85th session of the 209th Wizengamot, specifically Article II of the Limited Sovereignty of Extra-Spatial Territories Act, to inform you of NEW standards required for compliance with the heretofore specified Act.

#######################################  
Please check the following to verify that the Department of Records has provided CORRECT and UP-TO DATE information  
#######################################

NUMBER OF OCCUPANTS: _TWO_

NAME(S) OF OCCUPANTS: _JACKIE GLORNBOROUGH_ (born 11 January, 1954 – naturalized Squib) _, GWYCHARDUS GLORNBOROUGH_ (born 5 March, 1938 – native-born wizard)

TOTAL AREA: _ZERO POINT FIVE FOUR FIVE EIGHT NINE ACRES_

MUGGLE-SHIELDING: _COMPLIANT_

LINKED TO: the area between 935j Diagon Alley and 935k Diagon Alley (residential area)

DESCRIPTION PROVIDED BY EUSEPHER GADDING (EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL LAND SURVEYOR, DEP. OF RECORDS): It's a house with a garden. All compliant. The soil looks a bit like moonrock and when I asked the couple, they said it's cos they ripped this extraspatial pocket from a universe where the Earth orbits around the Moon, 'stead of the other way around. Makes sense to me.

#######################################  
If ANY of the information presented above is inaccurate, you MUST return this letter with Form 11-Q58-A (red) specifying any inaccuracies.  
#######################################

As an incorporated territory of Magical Britain, in order to retain privileges of limited sovereignty, you are expected to be compliant with the following standards within SIX MONTHS on the penalty of a five thousand Galleon fine.

Failure to pay the fine within SIXTEEN DAYS will result in the DE-LINKING of your extraspatial territory from Diagon Alley.

The standards are printed below for your consideration:

A functioning Owl Office (see updated Owl Office Standards as of 11/03/1992) staffed by at least FIVE persons and TWENTY owls.

A functioning Floo (contact the Floo Network Authority for installation) to be maintained thrice weekly.

A functioning Auror Bell (contact the Auror Office for installation) to be polished twice daily.

If you CANNOT comply with these new standards for reasons likely to be unforeseen by the Ministry, you may APPEAL to the Office for the Enforcement of Regulations on Extraspatial Spaces in a period LESS THAN, but not EQUAL TO or MORE THAN FIVE DAYS, after which point you will be liable for fines, de-linking, and (in cases of deliberate evasion) an eight-month sentence in Azkaban.

Yours sincerely,

Rosemond Spandlewick

Chief Regulator of the Department of Warding and Land Expansion

* * *

Then Ozland read the second sheet of paper.

* * *

 **MINISTRY OF MAGIC**

 _DEPARTMENT_ OF _RECORDS_

Dear Mr Ozland Dwimmersmith,

The previous notice was addressed to your person in error.

To clarify, you are not required to comply with the ruling of the 85th session of the 209th Wizengamot, Article II of the Limited Sovereignty of Extra-Spatial Territories Act, due to the fact that the ruling does not pertain to your situation.

To further clarify, should you come into ownership of an extradimensional space larger than a halfacre, you will be required to comply with the aforementioned ruling, but owing to your situation (this situation being that, as of the sending of this letter on August 26, 1995, you do not own an extradimensional space larger than a halfacre), you are not required to comply with the aforementioned aforementioned ruling, by virtue of its inapplicability to your present situation.

Yours sincerely,

Wilmot Dapper-Twork

Chief Records Officer of the Department of Records

* * *

Then Ozland read the third sheet of paper.

* * *

 **MINISTRY OF MAGIC**

 _DEPARTMENT_ OF _MAGICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT_

Dear Mr Ozland Dwimmersmith,

We have received intelligence that a Muggle employed by the father of a Muggle affiliated with yourself severely, irreparably damaged Ministry property the previous afternoon (MBT):

One (1) owl, previously contracted to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

In accordance with the 1692 International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, the 1953 Ministry Property Damage Act, and the 1974 Closest Related Wizard Act, you are hereby required to appear in the Wizengamot to testify at nine o'clock, August 28, 1995 (MBT).

Formal wear is optional, but may lend additional weight to your testimony.

Yours sincerely,

Amelia Bones

Chief of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement

* * *

"Alright," Ozland said, folding up the letters with slightly trembling hands. He meticulously went through the possibilities in his head. _An elaborate prank, a coded message, an attempt at unsettling me before an important meeting or negotiation? Am I dreaming? No, I'm Ozland Cunningham – wait, didn't the letters say a different name?_

He unfolded the letters and went through them, half-expecting the words to shimmer and wriggle and bulge, which would have been the case had he been dreaming. But the words were solid on the page. "Jackie Glornborough, Ozland Dwimmersmith, Ozland Dwimmersmith," he read aloud, at this point doing his best to ignore the one remaining white owl (the blue owl had flown off just as he started reading), "there's an explanation for this first one – do dreams usually have internally-consistent explanations? Is there . . . "

 _Is there really any point to trying to figure this out logically if I'm in a dream? My ability to think logically would be compromised._

He suddenly snapped his fingers.

 _Nope, no banana. Damn. Maybe I should just play it by ear?_

It was getting dark. He checked his watch. _Seven forty-five. If I go to sleep, do I just go into a meta-dream or do I wake up?_

The owl seemed to be shuffling around impatiently, and as bizarre as it was, it was enough to drag Oz out of his reverie. "Fine," he said, glaring at it, "what? – oh," he mumbled sheepishly. The owl proffered the envelope with its talons, and then haughtily flew off, as if it were late for an appointment.

With both owls gone, some degree of normalcy had returned.

This time, he didn't bother giving the envelope more than a cursory examination, and pulled it apart with a neat tear down the middle.

 **######**

Inside was a letter, a newspaper clipping, and a tiny pocket watch.

 **######**

The clipping was old, old enough to be yellowed and crinkly like pastry.

It had a monotone photo of a man and a woman, both of them sitting down, as if posing for a photo, wearing ridiculous gowns and pointed hats.

But that wasn't the oddest thing about the photo – the oddest thing was that if you looked very closely, the man's finger was impatiently tapping on his knee.

He examined their faces. Nothing for ten seconds.

Then they both blinked.

Ozland shuddered. _This is some weird shit_.

The annotation underneath read 'Geldor Dwimmersmith, Astrava Dwimmersmith (neé Curresbreaker)' in tidy block capitals.

 _Wasn't that the name on the . . . ?_

Bewildered, he opted to read the letter.

* * *

Dear Mr. Dwimmersmith,

You may have been mystified by the letter from the Ministry you received earlier, concerning your acceptance into Hogwarts. (Or, perhaps not – I know nothing of your present circumstances, only that you are alive, and far away from the shores of Britain, hence why your letter has simply a name, rather than an address.)

But – fear not! Your befuddlement will be short-lived: the pocket watch indicates when Professor McGonagall and I are available for introducing you to magical Britain – when the segment around the edge of the clock turns green, we will be available. Most importantly, when it is convenient for you, and when you have absolute privacy (aside from your caregivers, who may also be in the room at the time), please press the top, and we should be along soon enough.

Yours,

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

P.S These are your parents.

 **######**


	3. Ch3 – Puddlejumping

**A/N: part of the reason why I wrote this fic was because part of the magic of Harry Potter was being introduced to a strange, weird world that was unfamiliar to us as it was to Harry. I've done my best to mess shit right up to recreate that sense of unfamiliar weirdness and I hope you find it refreshing. But be assured, there is reason in madness.**

 **#####**

CHAPTER THREE

 **#####**

In this document we outline a proposal to extend Soviet sovereignty in space through moving agricultural production to Venus.

We discuss our rationale in the first section.

In the sections following, we discuss a rigorous methodology for the terraforming of Venus into an environment suitable for permanent habitation.

The remainder of the document is dedicated to considering potential social, economic, and political implications of this proposal, and how cooperation may be secured with the Ministry of Magic.

Briefly, our terraforming proposal involves:

1\. Application of the Orendellian Cooling Ritual (a.k.a _Kalsekulma_ , development from Glacius Charm) - approx. five gigathaums - in order to bring Venus's atmospheric carbon dioxide to its triple point.

2\. Dry ice will be shipped and deposited on Mars, outer-system moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede etc.), or ejected into space as convenient. Suggested transportation methods outlined in document.

3\. Application of Kithrup's Water Ritual (development from Aguamenti Charm) - approx. thirty gigathaums required to create 460 quintillion litres of water.

4\. A scalable nitrogen-fixation mechanism invented by F. Gornak (paper in references)

5\. Biological seeding mechanisms invented by various xenoagriculture specialists (listed in credits).

Should the Committee accept our proposal and begin this year (1963), Venus will be habitable for genetically-engineered strains of wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, barley, and sorghum by 1985, and will be a fully-habitable Earth-like environment by 1989, according to optimistic projections.

\- Предложение о создании обитаемой среды на Венере посредством терраформирования (1963), "A proposal for the terraforming of Venus into a habitable environment (1963)", translated by Zhabina Pavla Yakovna (1984)

 **#####**

 _Venus, goddess of love that you are_

 _Surely the things I ask_

 _Can't be too great a task_

 _Venus, if you do I promise that I always will be true_

 _I'll give her all the love I have to give_

 _As long as we both shall live_

 **#####**

 _AUGUST 14, 1995, THE VOID_

He closed his eyes.

Albert Jackson was sitting in a lilac armchair in a void, dotted by stars. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres below him, was Venus, with its turquoise oceans, obscured by thick clouds, like the mist on a bathhouse mirror. Aphrodite, the main continent, was tiled with millions of farms, squares of yellow and light-green. There were cities, too, with populations in the hundreds of thousands - whenever a pollinating drone needed to be repaired, whenever an automatic tractor needed fixing, whenever a transport path broke down, they were there. With the sheer economies of scale and the clockwork efficiency of the entire operation, no Earth farm could really compete. Three orbcraft, their golden surfaces gleaming, undocked from the Venusian loading-sites, briefly exchanged protocols with his own craft, and then disappeared - accelerating to near light-speed in a fraction of an instant.

He opened his eyes.

Albert Jackson was sitting in a lilac armchair in a cosy room, dimly lit by three lamps on top of three bookshelves, all overflowing with books he'd read eight times over. On the other side of the room was a small, unobtrusive clock and a vase of dead primroses. Directly facing him was another armchair - a yellow one - and up until recently, it had been empty. But a man with blond hair had slipped in through the door while his eyes were closed.

"Ah, Albert Jackson," the man said, flashing a smile, "I thought I might surprise you. I'm Gilderoy Locker."

The man seemed to think the name was its own explanation, and Albert had the feeling he'd seen the man's face somewhere, maybe in a newspaper, but otherwise drew a total blank.

« _Don't ask me, my memory goes back billions of years, but I have no damn clue who this bloke is. Probably some posh businessy fuck, judging by his prissy suit._ » said Kvasar in the back of his head.

"Mister Locker, whoever you are," Albert said bluntly, "everything that happens on this ship, I know about. So what's your business in my quarters?"

Locker looked taken aback, but smiled again good-naturedly. "You certainly don't mince your words, Albert, I can appreciate that - "

« _He smiles too much, don't trust him further than you can throw him out of an airlock._ »

" - I take it you don't recognise me?"

Albert scratched his nose. "No, not really."

"Ahem, well, I happen to be on the board of the Executive Council," he declared. The phrase carried with it a certain pompous weight, as if he had said 'the throne' or 'the presidency'.

"The what?"

The man shuffled about in his seat, all the while maintaining that good-natured smile. "The Executive Council of Standard Holdings, would I be right in saying you've heard of the corporate owner of this orbcraft?" He'd obviously intended them to come across as light-hearted, but instead the words were condescending.

« _What a fucking prick! Make sure he isn't anyone too important and sock him good to teach him a lesson,_ » the orb said, testily.

"Of course," Albert replied. He'd only recently finished reading 'The Depression and the Rise of the All-American Oligarchy: 1939 - 1971' by Bernard Luckwater. After the new regime had struck down all the antitrust legislation, all of the largest companies began merging together - Chrysler with General Motors, Exxon Mobil with Amoco, and so on and so on until -

"And Walter Rockefeller?"

"Mhm."

"His death?"

"Oh, really?" Albert had probably missed that newspaper. "I suppose it happens to all of us."

"Indeed," Locker said with an odd look on his face, "all of us. And when it happened to him, he left his entire fortune - an eighth of the global economy at the time, really - to his cat, Tibbles."

"This is all very interesting trivia, Mister Locker, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?"

« _Notice how his smile is getting more and more fixed by the minute,_ » murmured Kvasar.

"The Executive Council," the man said, sighing, "is vested with the responsibility of acting on behalf of Tibbles. I'm the ninth member of the Council, as matter of fact."

« _Explains why he had the keys to get up here in the first place,_ » said the orb, nonchalantly. « _I bet he's a serial killer who gets off on knifing old orb-pilots and eating their livers with fava beans and a nice chianti. Either that or you're about to be promoted. I'd call it fifty-fifty. I hope you have your switchblade with you - I mean, do the sums, probably best to stab him right now on the off-chance._ »

Albert, still in his pyjamas, blinked.

"I'm about to ask you a few questions, and some of them might seem odd to you, but bear with me," he unsheathed a gnarled, light-reddish stick. "Do you know what this is, Mr Jackson?"

Albert _felt_ a flash of recognition, but it disappeared, like clutching onto a dream, until maybe it wasn't recognition at all. "No."

"I _was_ good," the man murmured under his breath. "Do you remember Julita?"

"Of course. She was my wife," Albert said coldly. "And what's the point of all this questioning?"

"Your wife passed away some time ago. Do you remember attending the funeral?"

 _I don't . . . she . . ._ "No. I must've, though. She told me . . . if she went before I did, I should put primroses on her grave. I must . . . I must have been on one of the Venusian colonies, I . . . "

"Do you remember the last thing she said?"

Albert rocked back and forth, deep in thought. "She said she . . . needed to go some place, a place outside of Britain." He looked up. "Is this a promotion?"

The man smiled. "I suppose you could call it a promotion of sorts." Gilderoy Lockhart closed his eyes, and flicked his wand in a concentric pattern. " _Eunoe_."

 **#####**

"Lord Crandlestoom, do you remember now?"

 **#####**

. . .

. . .

"Did you say _Lord_?"

 **#####**

 _Twenty billion subjective years ago_

"How many times?"

"One hundred and nine trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion. I'm not sure if you can imagine it - a feeling of cosmic frustration every time something goes wrong, in fact, I know you can't because we've had this exact conversation twenty thousand times. But I know, if I keep going, keep going, if I have _all_ of the prophecies, if I guide everything perfectly, well - it's assured, isn't it? It's just a question of rolling the die just another time."

 **#####**

 _OZLAND CUNNINGHAM / DWIMMERSMITH - AUGUST 25, 1995 - 12 MARSDEN ST., SANDRINGHAM, INCORPORATED TERRITORY OF THE CELESTIAN UNORTHODOX CHURCH AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND_

Ten p.m.

Red.

Ten fifteen p.m.

Red.

Ten thirty p.m.

Red.

Ten forty-five p.m.

Red.

Ozland's hands were trembling, his greyish-brown hair gleamed with sweat. He'd been staring at the watch from the envelope for an unbroken ten minutes. The phone had rung, he'd picked it up, shouted incoherently into it, and flung it down again. He paced around in his house, occasionally taking a swig from a bottle of water. The doorbell had rung, it was Evelyn. She'd told him he looked like a total wreck, and he'd nodded impatiently and said he'd be unavailable for most of the night. She asked him if he'd seen her on the seven o'clock broadcast. He replied that he hadn't been watching TV at the time. She looked a bit crestfallen, but seemed heartened when he suggested he could borrow a recording from the station, and told her he'd get one sent through the post.

Eventually, he went to a mirror, wiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead, combed, changed, and then changed again into something more nondescript and bland. He dunked his head into the refrigerator, but after a while it started beeping and leaking water. He'd downed three white pills of something, and was halfway through his third sandwich of something else - hopefully not the same thing that the pills were made of - sitting at the table in the kitchen, almost glaring at the faux marble, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of colour.

The watch was green.

He felt like vomiting.

He leant over, holding it for a while, and then pushed down the latch release, using both thumbs even though it wasn't really necessary.

There was a soft click.

Nothing happened.

He pressed it again, and nothing happened again - except for that soft click.

He counted, second by second, as a minute passed - and then another minute, and then another. With each second, he felt more and more relieved. A minute later, he broke out into a wide smile.

After another minute had passed, he'd come up with several mundane explanations for the owls and the letters, and almost convinced himself that he'd been tricked.

That was when the doorbell rang.

* * *

Ozland shivered, straightened his jacket, and walked to the front door.

 _Alright, it's probably Evelyn again. Or maybe the post? No, hold on - I haven't rung them about that yet. Dom? Kevin? Nobody else knows where I live._

He grasped the knob, and a prickly sensation ran down his back. For the sake of caution, he decided to look through the peephole first.

A strange sight confronted him.

Two figures stood at the door. One was holding a stick with a light coming from the tip, and as his eyes adjusted, he was able to make out more details. The man holding the stick looked to be in his mid thirties, but he had an enormous gray beard that went down to his waist, which swung, ever so slightly, in the late night breeze. Ozland wondered if it was dyed, and then wondered _why_ someone would dye their beard gray. Like the woman standing next to him, he wore a rather silly-looking pointy black hat, the top of which was slumped over. He wore a robe, which, Ozland could just about tell, was faintly purple.

The woman looked to be in her late twenties, and wore strict black, but that was all he could see in the murky dark.

There was an intangible aura of _oldness_ about them.

The man moved forward and pushed the doorbell ringer, very patiently.

"Are you _sure_ that's how they work, Albus?" asked the woman, with a distinct Scottish accent.

"Perhaps," intoned the bearded man, "I admit, I am not entirely well-versed with these things."

"Maybe it needs a minor blood sacrifice, like Heward's door," the woman hummed.

"I suppose it can't hurt to try," the man calmly said, pulling out a small knife. "Which finger do you prefer?"

"Just a minute - I think I have a blood pouch in here somewhere," the woman said, rummaging around in her pouch, "Merlin bless the man who invented _those_."

"Mr Dwimmersmith?" called out 'Albus', knocking on the door.

Ozland traced a few metres back from where he was, and then very loudly walked up to the door, turning the knob and opening it, as if he'd only just heard.

"Albus Dindledore and Minerva McGongallo?" he said, brutally stumbling over their names.

 _Lord, strike me down where I stand._

The woman gave an amused snort, and a flicker of a smile passed over the man's face. "Nearly, Mr Dwimmersmith, nearly. If it makes you feel any better, in panic, Kevin Entwhistle called her Mineta McGrangallow, and myself Albus Dippledoop. As a reminder, my name is Albus _Dumbledore_ , Headmaster of Hogwarts, and this is Professor Minerva _McGonagall_ , Deputy Headmistress."

Ozland reddened, although thankfully, the poor lighting made it difficult to see.

"Now," said Albus Dumbledore, his voice taking on a more serious tone, "where _are_ your parents, young man?"

Oz hadn't been called 'young man' in about four years. He'd been called 'O Wise Leader of the Ten Thousand Stars', 'Saint Cunningham', or 'God-King', or whatever else Evelyn thought she could reasonably get people to call him when she had the leverage of being able to order their immediate executions. It was odd, all of a sudden, to be talked _down_ to - still more for someone to _ask where his parents were_ \- but evidently these people hadn't done their research, or at least hadn't had the time to do their research. _It's absurdly refreshing to talk to someone who doesn't think I'm some kind of magical demigod._

He paused. "My parents passed away in a house fire," he said, slowly, "and I've been living independently since then with the help of the local church." He carefully avoided saying: _they were burned to death in a religious turf war, and the people who burned them made me their leader after I levitated a pen._ "Now, if you don't mind, I have a few questions I'd like answered - actually, no," he added, correcting himself, slightly hysterically, "that doesn't even _begin_ to cover it - "

Dumbledore held up a hand. "No doubt. Allow me to provide a short explanation, and then we shall move on from here." Ozland felt the invasive sensation of someone rifling through filing cabinets, but somehow in his head. The man looked somewhat startled, and coughed. "Er, Minnie, would you . . . "

"Certainly," Professor McGonagall replied. "Mr Dwimmersmith - "

"Cunningham, actually."

" - Mr Cunningham, then. Have you ever had anything inexplicable or extraordinary happen to you?" she went on. _She sounds like she's done this before_ , Ozland noticed.

"Sure," he answered, a little skeptically. "I once opened a tin of sardines, and there was another smaller tin of sardines inside, and inside _that_ tin of sardines - "

"Ah, I should be more specific. There is a phenomenon called accidental magic which occurs mostly in children experiencing strong emotions, although, in the absence of a formal magical education, some learn to exert a degree of control over their abilities. About one in, oh, thirty thousand people - if you don't count the Soviets - can do it. Witches and wizards."

"Interesting," Ozland said neutrally. "You'd think more people would know about that kind of thing."

"Of course, but we do have spells to selectively alter memory and perception, which makes it much easier to maintain strict information quarantine procedures from Muggle - that is to say, non-magical - society."

"Although naturally," Dumbledore interjected, seeming to have been deep in thought up until that point, "we do have some limited interaction with Muggle corporations and governments - if I recall correctly, the Trans-Pacific Railway was constructed in cooperation with the Ministry of Magic and the People's Republic of China."

"The Ministry of Magic?" he probed.

"Our government, or at least the administrative side of it," Dumbledore said. He glanced at his watch. "We should be leaving to Diagon Alley to purchase your supplies about now, the rest of the explaining will have to be done along the way." He pointed his stick ( _wand?_ ) at the pavement outside Ozland's house, murmured something, and a stream of water spurted out, pooling into a puddle.

"Hold on," Ozland said, following him out the door and into the night, "what's with the water? And where's it from?"

The wizard seemed to be sprinkling some sort of powder into the water. "Puddlejumping. Unless you would prefer to Apparate twenty times in order to get to Diagon Alley instead?"

"Apparate?"

"'Telly-portation'," said Professor McGonagall, clearly satisfied at having found the right word. "I find the sensation to be fairly similar to being forced through a curly drinking straw. Oh, and the water?" Ozland nodded. "Honestly, Mr Cunningham - take your pick. Vapour in the atmosphere, the Atlantic Ocean, hydrogen and oxygen from the Sun, zero-point energy flatulations, M-space, condensation from the aetherial wind . . . to name a few of the ideas Filius's students have come up with. Although," she added, tapping her cheek and seeming to give the subject some consideration, "I'm rather partial to the aetherial wind model."

Dumbledore leant down, almost kneeling, and tapped the centre of the puddle once with his wand. "Diagon Alley," he declared.

As Ozland walked toward it, the puddle of water went from a dull, metallic glow to a brightness suggestive of daylight. It _should_ have reflected the streetlamps, the crisscrossing power lines, and the twinkling stars in the night sky - but instead, it was as if a hole had been punched through the ground and all the way out the other side.

 _Alright_ , Ozland herded his thoughts together into something coherent, _time to do a reality check._

He counted the fingers on his hand.

 _Ten, okay._

He pinched his nose and tried to breathe through it.

He couldn't.

He attempted to remember what he'd been doing in the twelve hours up until that point. _Denny's discussion, Rushabh dead, floating priest, negotiating with the Seventy-Sevens over the phone, notifying the Red Dragons, rereading the Book of Matchwell, I told Evelyn I needed some time to think, went to my old neighbourhood, then the owls with the letters, told Dom I wouldn't be available, took the photo of my 'parents' down to the police station for analysis_ . . .

 _I'm not dreaming_.

 _Saint Matchwell, I'm not dreaming._

He stared into the puddle. Tall buildings were visible - ones that didn't have the regularity of windowed skyscrapers. In fact, they looked like small suburban houses haphazardly stacked on top of one another, although that didn't make any sense - it wouldn't be structurally sound.

Professor McGonagall cleared her throat in front of him, standing on the other side of the pool. "Shall I go first?"

"Go?" echoed Ozland, standing up.

She locked her arms together in a V-shape, and, without warning, after a small running distance, dove in, head-first.

Ozland was sorely tempted to do another reality check.

He peered into the puddle, and reared back when the woman's face appeared, looking up ( _or down?_ ) at him. He couldn't make out what she was saying, but she was holding out a hand, as if urging him to grab onto it. Ozland tentatively dipped his finger into the water, and was instinctually surprised when, after passing through a thin layer of liquid, his hand came out the other side.

He grasped Professor McGonagall's hand (her grip was unexpectedly strong), and -

 **#####**

 _SIDE-SIDE-ALLEY 310A, SIDE-ALLEY 2B, DIAGON ALLEY, MAGICAL BRITAIN, LONDON_

"Where _are_ we?" was the first question Ozland had, after stumbling about, totally disoriented, on the cobblestone street. He was also quite wet, and dripping water everywhere. He blinked, goggling at the second, red-tinted moon in the washed-out sky, and the strange, ring-shaped clouds.

Dumbledore was next, springing out of the puddle with aplomb. After instantly drying himself off (somehow), he tapped his wand to the water, and it returned to a subdued mercury-grey colour.

Professor McGonagall pointed _her_ wand at Ozland, and murmured something that sounded vaguely like "cucumber", and he detachedly observed as his clothes went from soaking wet to iron-dry in a few seconds.

Around him were houses. The one closest to him looked like the brick frontage of a bungalow, with a letterbox and windows and a wooden door, but . . .

There was another one on top of it, and another one on top of _that_ one, and so on and so on about forty times. All of them were arranged in a semi-irregular brickwork pattern.

The intimidating buildings loomed on both sides. He felt like a tiny bug, deep inside an urban crevasse.

Two to the left, and five houses up, was the door to a men's bathroom, and as Ozland stared, the door flung open, and a wizard walked out onto thin air, eating a mushroom kebab. The wizard swirled his wand, grumbled "ground floor, please," and slowly began to descend, with regular elevator-like _dings_ marking his descent.

"Well," Dumbledore said grandly, unfolding an enormous map, "we appear to be on Side-Side-Alley 310A, on Side-Alley 24B - of Diagon Alley, of course. Unfortunately, that _is_ the main drawback to puddlejumping - you _will_ end up roughly where you want to be, but where you want to _be_ is not always the same as where a puddle _is_."

Ozland pointed up at the sky. "Er, I'm more concerned about _that_ ," he said.

"Oh, _that_. Why the concern?" Dumbledore asked, blandly.

"Well, you know, _usually_ there's only one moon in the sky, and it's white."

"One moon, two moons, three moons, eight moons, no moons - what difference does it make?"

"We're still on _Earth_ , right?"

"I suppose you could say _an_ Earth," Dumbledore replied mysteriously.

"Can . . . can anyone give me a straight answer here?"

" _An_ Earth indeed," Professor McGonagall said, no less mysteriously, "but, at the same time, not exactly."

"A fragment torn from a parallel reality, anchored to an extradimensional pocket within London," Dumbledore explained, finally. "But we have more pressing concerns, such as navigating our way out of this side-side-alley. I suggest we take the three lefts after this corner and repeatedly loop around until we get to Gringotts."

Professor McGonagall seemed to take the suggestion seriously. "It usually works," she said, after Ozland gave her a disbelieving look.

They began walking, and he began to ask a question, but realised he didn't really know _what_ question to ask, because there were just so _many_ reasonable ones like 'How is that supposed to work?' or 'Where's the red moon from?' or 'Who were my parents?' or 'What's Gringotts?' . . .

"What's Gringotts?" asked Ozland, filing away the other questions for later. He felt like a child again, and not necessarily in a good way.

"A trustworthy bank," Professor McGonagall answered, dryly.

 _Oh, good - something that makes_ sense _for once._

" - run by goblins. Unless you trust Malfoy, that disgusting financial shark." At his confusion, she added: "Lucius Malfoy, the right-hand man of You-Know-Who - ah, I suppose you don't know who You-Know-Who - "

"Nope."

"You-Know-Who was . . . a very powerful Dark wizard, who tyrannised magical Britain for about ten years," she elaborated, seeming to choke up in some parts. "It would be wise not to . . . mention him in polite conversation, Mr Dwim - Cunningham . . . the Death Eaters, they were his followers . . . many lives were lost in that war, Mr Cunningham. We're still recovering."

"I'm sorry for bringing the subject up," Ozland said courteously - even though privately, he was wondering whether there were any sensible _rules_ saying you couldn't start a civil war unless you had a name that didn't sound like a heavy metal band. "Are there any books which discuss the, er, era?"

Professor McGonagall nodded, a bit dispassionately. "About half of any bookstore, really. But as I was saying, Lucius Malfoy assisted You-Know-Who, and took possession of the Death Eaters' war fund after their demise and - well, he didn't start a _bank_ per se, Gringotts has a legal monopoly on that - but because of all the looting and the shortage of coin, everyone was issuing debt notes - "

"Debt notes?"

She withdrew a rectangular piece of paper from her handbag and passed it to him. "They look like these - that's a Ministry debt-note, along the top you can see 'The Ministry Of Magic Promises To Pay The Bearer Of This Note One Sickle' message." Ozland examined the shimmering silver note, fascinated - the text swirled around in patterned eddies. "They had to issue those because the Ministry couldn't possibly pay all of the salaries during after raid in '75, and then they just started circulating about - even after the War finished, they kept printing them. Oh dear, I've strayed from the topic _twice_ now, haven't I?" she paused, evidently trying to remember what Ozland's original question was. "In any case, Lucius Malfoy began issuing debt-notes, backed by the enormous war fund that the Death Eaters accumulated through years of murder, pillaging and extortion," she said, sourly, "so really, it's _him_ or Gringotts. The man _loans_ more Galleon _notes_ than he has solid coin - and the goblins refuse to even _issue_ loans - honestly," she sighed, "it's such a bloody mess, whenever there's a new election to the Mysterium, Malfoy just prints out however much he needs to run the campaign - it's bleeding us dry."

"More notes than coin? _How_ much more, exactly?"

Dumbledore spoke. "About four thousand to one - but that is not yet public knowledge - and I would appreciate your discretion in _keeping_ it that way, Mr Cunningham," he added, in a serious tone.

"Forgive me for asking, but why not just cause a run on his bank?"

The wizard and the witch looked at one another. "That would be exceedingly unwise, and the ensuing chaos and ruin . . . " Dumbledore trailed off.

"As much as I hate to say it," Professor McGonagall said distastefully, "well, I'm no _expert_ in economancy, but Lucius's ' _loan-issuance_ service' _has_ been fairly instrumental in bouncing back from the destruction of the War, and encouraging everyone to force him to cough up would likely be utterly disastrous. It's another area where he has . . . significant leverage - although Albus's faction _has_ successfully blocked the Bill to remove the trimetal standard."

While they talked more, Ozland noted that, even though they'd been going around and around in a loop, with each pass, fewer and fewer of the buildings were residential, and more and more people were out and about.

"Uh, so about my parents," Ozland awkwardly changed the topic, "could either of you tell me a bit more about them?"

"I know little more than is available in public records," Dumbledore said, "but your mother, Astrava Curresbreaker, graduated from Durmstrang and worked in the Department of Warding and Dimensional Expansions before marrying your father, Gelder Dwimmersmith, the last heir of the Dwimmersmith line."

"What, so he was rich?"

"The Dwimmersmiths owned a number of Atlantic leylines," Dumbledore replied elusively, "and accumulated enormous wealth and power - leylines were once necessary to power wards and Artifactures, but they were largely superseded in the thirties by turnstones, elemental fields, and the Cup of Magic."

"So not that rich anymore?"

"Oh, I wouldn't be so - "

 **#####**

"Five Sickles, and a Knut."

"Surely there must be a mistake."

They were standing at a reception table, and just a moment ago, the goblin had pushed over five silver coins and a bronze coin, and then aloofly folded its arms, as if the matter had been settled.

"Gringotts does not make mistakes, young wizard," it enunciated.

"Surely there are the deeds to the Atlantic leylines, or whatever they're called?"

The goblin consulted a long roll of parchment. "Atlantic leylines A103, A104, A106, and B551, were liquidated from 1984 to 1993 to accommodate the annual vault fee, and have since been sold to ThauLeylines - A Subsidiary Of ThauCorp."

"Hold on," Ozland said turning to Dumbledore, "does that mean . . . ?"

"Unfortunately yes," Dumbledore said quietly. "Minerva and I will pay for your supplies and your tuition, unless . . . "

 _Oh come on, there's no need to trail off like that just to build up dramatic tension_ , Ozland felt like saying. "Unless?"

"Mr Cunningham, in the interest of candidness, when we first met eye-to-eye, I suspected that your story, if not a falsification, was at the very least purposefully incomplete. I used a technique called Legilimency to assuage my suspicions, which involved a brief mental intrusion. It was a grave violation of your privacy, and for that I apologise." Dumbledore adjusted his half-moon glasses and sighed tiredly. "May I ask for your permission to divulge some pertinent aspects of your home situation to Minerva?"

He nodded vaguely, still thinking over the implications of what Dumbledore had loosely implied, was a form of mind-reading.

Dumbledore spoke to Professor McGonagall. "Mr Cunningham's latent, semi-controlled accidental magic was co-opted by a local Muggle religion - perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a sovereign nation."

"Co-opted?" Her face was impassive, from which Ozland was able to infer that she was more disturbed by the revelation than she was interested in letting on.

"At the outset, yes. I wasn't able to glean much, perhaps Ozland can expand on my remarks, but he quite rapidly rose through the ranks, so to speak, in part due to the daughter of the founder of the religion, and a Muggle-drug manufacturer who forced the cooperation of the criminal syndicates in the area by threatening to detonate a nuclear weapon - and, as far as I was able to discern, his tactfulness and strategic mindset."

"What are you saying, Albus?"

Ozland had caught on almost immediately. "He's implying, in a roundabout way, that I probably actually have the funds to - wait," he looked at the goblin, who had been listening with mild interest, "do you do currency conversion?"

"Of course," the goblin replied, as if it were an utterly stupid question.

He dug into the pockets of his jacket, and pulled out a handful of undollars - banknotes printed by the Unorthodox Church. They looked like crumpled red bus tickets. He had, in total, about a thousand undollars with him. "I don't suppose you'd be able to convert these into, er, Galleons?" he said, putting all of them on the counter.

Wordlessly, the goblin gathered all of the notes, placing them under a brass microscope-like device, with the word 'VALOROEXTRACTOR' printed in tidy block capitals on its base. The goblin adjusted the dials, and all of a sudden, there was a blindingly bright light. Very carefully, the goblin picked up a pair of golden tweezers, and took to the undollar notes with a look of concentration on its face, eventually extracting a transparent, yellowish, gossamer . . . _something_ , that looked like the bastard child of a jellyfish and a handkerchief, teasing and peeling it apart from the paper, and eventually placing it on a set of scales with the word 'VALOROSCALE'. The goblin referred to the scales for a moment, and then -

"Nineteen Galleons, twelve Sickles, and five Knuts."

"Uh," Ozland said, "what just happened there?"

"I extracted and weighed the value," the goblin explained, slowly, "and gave the figure in terms of wizarding currency."

 _Of all the things I've seen today . . ._ And then a thought occurred to him. "I need a piece of paper. And a pen."

Dumbledore tugged at the air, producing a small scrap of paper and a ballpoint, silently passing them to him.

Neatly, Ozland began writing. _I, Ozland Cunningham, certify that the bearer of this note will, upon contacting the Ministry of Transport of the Celestial Unorthodox Church, have exclusive access to the South Auckland motorway from 3am to 4am from January 1996 to April 1996._

He signed the paper with a flourish, passed over the note to the goblin, who went through the entire process again, and then, seemingly impressed, read out: "Two thousand four hundred and ninety-six Galleons, fifteen Sickles, and twenty-one Knuts. Would you like to cash that in, Mr Dwimmersmith?"

"Yes," Ozland said immediately. "Is there any way I could _purchase_ a valoroextractor and a, uh, valoroscale?" he added quickly before the goblin left to get the money.

Professor McGonagall winced, and the goblin's expression went cold. "It was goblinkind that crafted these instruments, and Gringotts that owns them. They are not available to 'purchase'. Were you to come into possession of them through more illicit means," it almost sneered, "they would be quite useless to you, without adequate knowledge of the delicate magics behind their operation. Have an excellent day," the goblin ended.

Ozland grimaced, looking to Professor McGonagall and Dumbledore in turn. "Did I just commit a really _bad_ faux pas? Also how much is two thousand Galleons really worth?"

 **#####**

Yes, and a lot, were the answers.

Their next stop was Ollivanders, a wand store.

Ozland and Ollivander passed through rows of dusty boxes stacked too high to be comfortable standing between, and reached the back, whereupon Ollivander opened a door, revealing an endless forest.

He hadn't expected that.

"Allow me to explain, Mr Dwimmersmith," Ollivander said, kindly. "Diagon Alley is contained within a pocket, I suppose you could say, of nonlocal space-time - space-time torn from another 'universe' - Chief Warlock Albus Dumbledore, the man you came in with, was, in fact, the one who did it - _wedged_ very delicately inside local space-time, like tearing a hole inside white bread and putting a chunk of cheese inside - my apologies, Mr Dwimmersmith, I haven't had lunch yet and my mind is naturally drifting towards . . . anyway, now, when you try and create a dimensional expansion _within_ a pocket such as Diagon Alley, there's nothing to expand _into_ , per se - if I were to go through the appropriate ritual right now - the Ministry regulates that very heavily, by the way, Mr Dwimmersmith, so don't get any ideas - since the back of this store is _right_ at the edge of the pocket, hence the buzzing noise you're hearing right now, there would just be blank white space. Nothingness. _But_ , through careful experimentation - oh, most of it must have been in the late seventies and early eighties - we found that if you _leave_ something inside that white space, it acts as a _seed_ in a way, and nobody is really sure how it works. Someone accidentally left a grocery basket in a blankspace once, and it turned into an infinitely-large, self-restocking supermarket, so it wasn't _all_ eldritch abominations - aha, not that there _were_ any eldritch abominations produced necessarily - or, I suppose, not that there _weren't_ any eldritch abominations - but I digress, the records are sealed, and I've said too much already, young man. So, this forest - this forest was the product of the days before Ministry regulation, I'd just about had enough with making wands all day long, you wouldn't believe how tedious it is, so I had this lovely blankspace, yes? I threw a handful of wands in there, and called it a night. Ah, I see you're beginning to understand now. Yes, those _are_ what we might call 'wand-trees', that's exactly what people call them. Muggle-raised? I can tell by your ghastly clothes, no offense intended. You must have a natural intuition. But I digress once more - it's very simple. Just put on the belt, clip the spool to it - so you don't get lost, that forest really is infinitely large, Mr Dwimmersmith - then put on this blindfold and when you bump into a tree, just give the rope four short tugs and I'll be right along. Even if it's been a full ten minutes of a walking, an hour, two hours, or so on, don't stop until you bump into a tree. And if you hear any animal noises or footsteps, don't worry - the Weasley twins left a few invisible everlasting flying cassette players when they last came, and I haven't been able to find all of them."

The forest canopy was thick enough for the sky to be completely occluded, but nevertheless, the forest was well-lit with an indistinct greenish glow. There was a conspicuous lack of leaves on the ground, which made the area look like a creepily well-maintained lawn. "Right, let's do this," said Ozland.

 **#####**

A quarter of an hour later, Ozland was completely fucking terrified.

He'd thought it would be easy enough after the first minute of walking forward with no eyesight in an environment that he knew had solid obstacles everywhere, listening only to the sounds of his own footsteps (and, occasionally other, very quiet footsteps).

But no, it really, really didn't get any easier, especially since he knew he'd bump into a tree anytime now.

The sound of a macaw, and then a squealing pig, echoed in the distance, and he shivered.

He'd been trying to think about the valoroscale. What if he'd written ' _The Celestial Unorthodox Church will give, to the bearer of this note, one ounce of gold on May 15, 1996_ ' - was the valoroscope somehow prescient, or only giving a best estimate? Probably the second, because otherwise they wouldn't be used on Gringotts counters, because Gringotts would be ruling the world rather than levying fees for standing in one place for too long. Was it a probability-weighted average value or the most likely value? Where did the knowledge for its best estimate come from? He supposed he could find out by writing ' _The C.U.C will give, to the bearer of this note, ten Sickles - if, and only if, President Labar wins Chihuahua in the next election_ ' - if it was 'zero' or 'ten Sickles', it would be 'most likely value', and if it was 'two Sickles and eleven Knuts', it would be an averaged value - and it would also indicate that the valoroscope didn't really have precise advanced knowledge of future events. If it was zero or ten Sickles, he still wouldn't really know - and, afterall, it wouldn't be too easy to distinguish between being _really_ good at extrapolating the future versus actually knowing it. Unless, perhaps, there was a way to set up a totally random binary event, one that was completely disconnected from prior -

There was a loud clunk as Ozland's blindfolded head connected with the trunk of a tree. He dutifully tugged at the rope four times and took off the blindfold. "There has to be a better way to do this," he groaned, before returning to his original train of thought, sitting down at the base of the tree. _Alright, future knowledge aside, how else could I use a valoroscope?_ There wasn't really much else he could think of, aside from the obvious thing which it had been built for. _Assessing mineral resources over areas of land? The contents of safes? Discerning between real and fake diamonds?_ Evaluating insurance contracts, patents, corporate shares, and yet-to-be released books would probably fall under 'future knowledge'.

Ollivander was along quickly enough. "This one, eh?" he brought out a small chiseling tool, breaking off a fragment of the wood and holding it up to his left eyepiece. "Walnut and dittany stalk, an interesting combination, I suppose. Walnut often has an affinity for, well, people who _push beyond_ , shall we say. Spellcrafting, rituals, dimensional arithmancy. Dittany stalk, on the other hand, is really for people more inclined towards Divination. An interesting combination indeed - Reginald Rookwood's wand was walnut and dittany."

"Is that a famous person?"

"Only the ritualist who inadvertently created the Cup of Magic and altered the course of magical society forever to come, Mr Dwimmersmith. Not that that would be a very sensible thing to aim towards. In any case," he said, changing the topic, "how many wands do you want? Ten Sickles each, and in all likelihood, you won't be able to find this tree again."

"How many Sickles to the Galleon?"

"Seventeen," Ollivander replied crisply.

 _A thousand undollars is about twenty Galleons is about four hundred Sickles, is forty wands. A thousand divided by forty is twenty-five undollars a wand - shit, that's about the price of an ice cream_. He grinned. "Alright, I'll take thirty."

"Only thirty?"

 _Only thirty? Really?_

At Ozland's confused look, he added: "The Cup has more than enough output to sustain a human Transfiguration for all of eternity - Albus is in his twelfth decade, and Minerva turned sixty this year - surely you noticed that they . . . ?"

' _Only thirty?' is only a sensible question if you're either overly cautious, or if you expect to live for a very long time_ , he realised.

"Excuse me," he said, weakly, "how long does a wand last on average, and how many wands do wizards usually buy?"

"Thirty years, if they're kept in good condition - twenty years if they're not, and of course they _are_ pieces of wood, and just as liable to break. And to answer your second question, about a hundred."

 _Wizards expect to live for about two thousand years?_

 **#####**

"You didn't let him talk you into anything silly like buying a hundred wands, did you?" Professor McGonagall asked wearily, looking at the enormous box Ozland had tucked under his arm.

Ozland groaned. "It seemed sensible at the time."

She shook her head. "It always does."

Dumbledore was busy talking to a translucent, silver dog. "Lord Speengrack, I can assure you that Augusta will be very amenable towards your amendment to the ink importation proposal - Minerva and I happen to be with a student at the moment, so we'll have to put this discussion on hold for the time being."

"Very well," said the dog in a deep, gruff voice, before disappearing.

"Excellent," said Dumbledore, clapping his hands. "Onwards we march." Ozland silently filed the translucent dog under 'questions to ask some time later but not now', as they walked out the door of Ollivanders and stopped in the middle of the street. "Onwards we march - or rather, onwards _you_ march, Mr Cunningham - Minerva and I have urgent business at Hogwarts, Mrs Weasley will help you pick up the rest of your supplies."

"Alright."

"As a matter of fact," Dumbledore continued, glancing at his watch (which, Ozland had noticed by this point, didn't have any hands), "the Weasley door should be just around the next corner if we catch it now, but we'll have to be quick about it."

They cut a brutal diagonal through the foot traffic and came to a tall edifice that was entirely covered in doors. Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall didn't seem to be off-put by the lack of stairs, and instead walked forward to stand on a welcome mat in front of one of the door-columns. They looked at him expectantly, and he respectfully complied with what was bound to be the latest episode of madness in magical Britain.

Dumbledore twirled his wand. "Weasley family residence," he said.

All of a sudden, jazzy elevator music began to play, and the welcome mat began ascending into the air with a whoosh. Each ding brought them one door higher. Ozland counted the dings, growing more and more apprehensive as the sounds from the street below grew more distant, and as the sound of the rushing wind grew louder, counting ten, then twenty, then fifty, before the welcome mat finally stopped at the seventy-fourth ding, floating up and down unsteadily - and it still wasn't at the very top. The scarlet door they had stopped at had, strangely enough, had the Volkswagen logo etched onto the front, with 'Weasley Motors' in gold letters just underneath.

" _Expecto patronum_ ," Dumbledore murmured. An enormous silvery bird appeared, and Ozland almost stumbled off the welcome mat, and probably would have fallen to his death, had Professor McGonagall not put a steadying hand on his shoulder. "Tell Molly that we're here with Ozland." The bird nodded and swooped off.

" . . . two questions, what was _that_ , and what's the Volkswagen logo doing on the door?"

Professor McGonagall seemed to have gotten the hang of answering questions without creating more. "A messenger spell, and that would be the symbol for Weasley Motors, who make flying automobiles - it's on all of their cars."

The door clicked open. Ozland was all too eager to get off the floating welcome mat, and was surprised to find himself standing on grass. He looked back at where he'd come from, and was even more surprised to find that they'd come out the door of what appeared to be an outhouse, that the sky above them didn't have _any_ moons, that they were standing in a wide open space, and that in front of him was were what, he could only presume, were three houses trying to make baby-houses with one another, who, in the throes of brickwork passion, had become permanently wedged together into a six-story-high architectural monstrosity. The red-haired woman speed-walking towards them could only be -

"Ah, Mrs Weasley, how good to see you again!" rumbled Dumbledore.

"Is _this_ the handsome young fellow picking up his supplies for Hogwarts?"

"Indeed," said Dumbledore, his eyes twinkling, "Minerva and I have urgent business at Hogwarts, unfortunately - Hagrid was a little unvigilant with his florkpurfle nest, and they'll be a few hours away from reaching the Type Three superintelligence stage . . . "

Mrs Weasley nodded sympathetically. "Don't you worry a thing, Albus. I'll just need to drag the children out shopping - oh, Ozland, why don't you come along?"

"Alright," Ozland was still craning his neck to look for a moon. _Might as well ask now._ "Er, why's there no Moon?"

"We had to move from Ottery St Catchpole during the War," Mrs Weasley said, slightly stiffly, "there wasn't enough time to find a universe-fragment with a moon in it. Anyway," she brightened, "take care of yourselves, Albus, Minerva." They nodded, and disappeared in a puff of displaced air.

She turned back to Ozland. "Want some lunch before we head out?"

 **#####**

"Early court documents as interpreted by Hölmstrom et al. indicate that the _Zauberkanzler_ of the Duchy of Bavaria (essentially equivalent to the Great Enchanter of Britain) formed the early underground society named the 'Illuminati', lead by _Hauptberater_ ('Chief Advisor' Wilhelm Eldrich Illuminati) on 1 May, 1776, the members of which primarily consisted of Wizards, formally opposing Muggle superstition and religious influence. Informally, the aim of the Illuminati was to fool Muggles into a system of Enlightenment beliefs known as 'rationality', such that they would be less likely to attempt witch-hunts and dismiss evidence of the existence of Magic as 'irrational'…"

\- Julipe H. Patrégon — _Superstition in 18th Century European Society: Wizarding-Muggle Relations_ (1981, [abbrev.] — Mopfthord Acad. Press)

 **#####**

NIGHT, AUGUST 24, 1995, LONG ISLAND ROAD, MONGOL TERRITORY, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

A balding man with a blue vein running down the side of his face dozed, asleep on an armchair on a balcony.

Distantly, crickets chirped and waves crashed along the beach.

A yellow lantern swung, hanging from the banister, making shadows dance in the darkness.

All of a sudden, very quietly, two hooded figures wearing necklaces popped into existence on the balcony.

The sleeping man snorted, turned to one side, and awoke with a start, fumbling around for his gun and squinting. He took in the balcony around him, scrutinising every corner, not seeing the hooded figures for some strange reason.

" _Somnium_ ," whispered one of the figures, taller than the other, with a lock of blonde hair poking out the side of his hood.

A slight glimmer struck the man in the chest. The man slumped over as the light hit him, forced into a stupor.

"Alright, Gil," said the shorter figure, in a low, measured voice, "do your thing, I'll handle his bones."

In the low light, the other figure flashed a grin. He had dazzling white teeth.

 **#####**


	4. Ch4 – A Really Big Supermarket

**AN/1: I'm still working out a more regular posting schedule, it might have to be once every two weeks.**

 **AN/2: Here's something that was edited out in the first chapter that was meant to go just before Ozland's bit: imgur** _ **dot**_ **com** _ **slash**_ **HXZNHCY**

 **#######  
** CHAPTER FOUR  
 **#######**

THE BURROW, DOOR 74, 1183 DIAGON ALLEY, INSIDE A DIMENSIONAL SOMETHING THAT WASN'T EXPLAINED PROPERLY, LONDON

 _"We had to move from Ottery St Catchpole during the War," Mrs Weasley said, slightly stiffly, "there wasn't enough time to find a universe-fragment with a moon in it. Anyway," she brightened, "take care of yourselves, Albus, Minerva." They nodded, and disappeared in a puff of displaced air._

 _She turned back to Ozland. "Want some lunch before we head out?"_

The Burrow, as Ozland found out it was called, made for a welcome respite from the lunacy of wizarding Britain. As long as he avoided looking out the windows at the vast, ancient craters that pockmarked the rolling English countryside around them like the bullet-holes of a target on an interplanetary firing range, he could _almost_ convince himself that there was really nothing wrong at all, and that he hadn't been whisked here — a pocket dimension, or _something_ (Ozland still wasn't really completely clear on that bit) — by a 120-year-old magical Headmaster after jumping through a puddle.

Mrs Weasley had done the introductions for Mr Weasley, Ron, Ginny, Fred, and George in turn. There had been some brief confusion over Fred and George, with Fred insisting that he was George, and George insisting that he was Fred, until Mrs Weasley demanded that they show their birthmarks, and it had turned out that they had Apparated into one another's seats while nobody was looking.

Mr Weasley and Ron had immediately bombarded him with questions, and after he'd answered (shortly and vaguely), Fred or George would follow it up with some unexpected question that threw him completely off-balance every time — all the while with Ginny staring sullenly into the depths of her plate, as if the act of staring would reveal to her the answer to an ancient cosmic riddle carefully hidden within the strewn-about pieces of carrot and parsley.

Eventually the twins seemed to grow bored with asking nonsensical follow-up questions, and started adding their own answers after Ozland had finished. It usually went like this:

Ron: So – is it _really_ true everyone in New Zealand has to wear ground-harnesses or else they fall into the Sun?

Ozland: No. Um, at least, I don't think —

Fred ( _confidently_ ): Of course not, Ronald. The Sun faces _away_ from the Southern Hemosphere.

Ozland ( _cautiously_ ): Right now it's not, if that's what you mean. It does in daytime.

Fred ( _even more confidently_ ): Exactly, when the Sun _does_ face the Southern Hemisphere, the Moon's on the other side so it always cancels out the gravity.

Ron ( _dubiously_ ): Wouldn't that just make you weightless?

George: Not if you wear really heavy boots.

He had made sure to wolf down the rest of his food (a slice of beef pie and pumpkin juice) as quickly as possible, which, quite cunningly, ensured that his mouth was full the whole time, rendering him unable to answer any questions.

Mr Weasley shook his hand vigorously after lunch had concluded. "Delightful talking to you, Ozland. And do try see what you can do about getting to the bottom of this thermos business, eh?"

Ozland hummed noncommittally. (Mr Weasley had asked earlier how thermoses could keep hot things hot and cold things cold, and he'd muttered something about heat conduction without admitting he didn't actually know.)

Mrs Weasley called from outside, her voice carrying through the house. "Time to go! Chop chop!"

The twins Apparated immediately, Ginny had already bolted out the door some time ago, and Ron was quickly finishing off the rest of the pie, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

"Er, hey mate," he began awkwardly, as Ozland reached the doorway, "sorry for all the questions back then - I'm not _that_ stupid," Ozland had been thinking 'gullible' maybe, but not 'stupid' - but Ron seemed intent on preemptively defending himself, "it's just, you know, with the twins it's always easier just to play along when they're doing their comedy routine." He visibly reddened.

"Uh, no worries," replied Ozland, a little warily, "I guess it's refreshing to be the one answering questions instead of asking them." He waited for Ron, and they started walking to the outhouse which lead out of the Weasley's universe-pocket-thing (he _really_ needed to get the mechanics of it explained to him sometime). "So," he said, "your brothers - they just Apparated, right?" _Note to self: brush up on small-talk._

Ron nodded. If he'd been aware of the clumsiness of the prompt, he gave no indication. "Ever since they got their licenses last year they haven't walked more than a yard. Well," he said, reflectively, "they do _sometimes_ , for the novelty. We'll have to wait until Seventh Year before the lessons, though," he added, preempting Ozland's question. There was something very earnest and carefree about the way he spoke that Oz couldn't help but begin to warm to him.

"Ah." Outside, he was reminded of Mrs Weasley's oddly stiff reaction to his question about the lack of a moon in their universe-pocket. He had the feeling that he really shouldn't be tugging at this particular thread, but it was also bothering him immensely. "Weird question, but I asked your mum about there being no moon in the sky - and she said that you guys had to move quickly - "

The red-head looked distinctly uncomfortable.

"Uh, you don't have to - "

"It's not really something we talk about," Ron said, quietly. "But I don't want you to think it was anything _really_ bad, at least not worse than all the things that happened in the War." He exhaled. "Mum says Charlie was tortured under the Cruciatus until he told the Death Eaters where we lived. We had a half-hour to find a universe, cut out a fragment, put the house in it, and shove it in an internally-expanded rucksack. Bill says it's a wonder he managed to find somewhere with _air_ , let alone a moon, in the time he had. He blames the whole thing on Dumbledore, for some reason, but mum's never been able to get him to tell us why."

"Charlie and Bill would be your - ?"

"Older brothers, yeah."

They were nearing the door to the outhouse now - Mrs Weasley was passing out long scrolls of paper to Ginny and the twins, seeming to scold them for some reason, although Ozland couldn't make out the words.

"Was Charlie . . . okay?" _Why am I even asking that?_

Ron looked at him strangely. "'Course, but, you know, he was a bit different after."

Professor McGonagall's words echoed in his head. _The Death Eaters, they were his followers . . . We're still recovering . . ._ "Jesus, I'm sorry about that."

"Not your fault, mate. And who's Jezars?"

That broke up the mood a little. Ozland coughed. "Um, just a Moggley saying."

"Muggle."

"Oh, yeah. Muggle."

 **#######**

" _Right_ ," Mrs Weasley said, with the air of a military general. "Ron, here's your list, you'll be teamed up with Ginny today." She handed Ron an unlabelled can. "Remember - use the everlasting baked beans to leave a trail, just in case you get lost - and _if_ the store closes before you get out - "

"Stay put, cover myself in cooked chicken to stay warm, don't rely on the Compass Charm, got it," Ron said, vacantly, looking over his list before leaving with Ginny.

The first entrance to the Supermarket had been discovered, or created, or _something_ by Giannis Slarkensson in 1973, and at that point, it was a small door, big enough only for a House Elf, with single turnstile. It could still be found along Side-Side Alley HNT-R2 – a mostly deserted street, which was itself the product of another magical accident – a fractal Geminio Curse cast by a disgruntled land developer.

Since then, the Supermarket had almost metastasised all across Diagon Alley. Mrs Weasley said you could usually tell if a new Supermarket entrance was emerging by the lumpy, organic protrusions it made in the sides of buildings and cobblestone streets, before bubbling out into a set of revolving doors. There had been an article in _The Quibbler_ about a woman who found an entrance to the Supermarket under her armpit, although apparently the evidence for that one was tenuous.

They had gone through the nearest entrance which was in one of the stalls in the men's bathroom of Borghill's Birdbath Boutique (there seemed to be a general alliterative trend with the naming schema, Ozland had noticed), and had come out, the blue-tinted light and chill air washing over them, between two freezers full of frozen peas, frozen kebabs and cheesecakes.

As they walked down the rows of freezers, he hadn't been able to stop himself from gawping – he'd never really seen anything like it before. After the economic collapse of the seventies, either you knew people who knew people who could smuggle two metric tonnes of salad dressing through the Trans-Pacific Railway, or you whipped up homemade salad dressing with vinegar, white paint, and dilute nitric acid. There was something ravishingly beautiful about its cold, sterile regularity. _Consume me_ , it beckoned. _Devour me, feast on me_ -

He reached towards a small strawberry cheesecake, and the voice abruptly stopped.

 _Hold on, I think there's a sensible thing to ask in this situation. But for the life of me, I can't – oh, that's it._

"Um, Mrs Weasley? Is this like a test of character or something? I'm not going to, say, eat this cheesecake, and then be turned _into_ a cheesecake?"

"Heavens, no. Whatever you want, you can take it. It's all free," she replied, preoccupied with scribbling illegible words onto the shopping list.

"And the price is, you know, really _nothing_ , rather than pieces of my soul or anything like that?"

"Nothing but your waistline."

The voice started again as he cautiously bit into the cheesecake. _Yes, eat up, boy. Take another._

"Mrs Weasley," he said mildly, "there's a voice in my head telling me to eat up and take another cheesecake."

 _Nothing dodgy or sinister going on around here,_ the voice said hurriedly, _purely altruistic motives. You just look a bit thin, that's all._

"Um, it's telling me I look a bit thin."

Mrs Weasley glanced at him, then returned to her list. "You _do_ look a bit thin."

 _See?_ , said the voice, with a touch of indignance.

 _Well_ , thought Ozland, _I've never seen a newspaper with the title 'Man Saves Twenty Drowning Orphans, Builds Hospital, Helps At Homeless Shelter: Says A Voice In His Head Told Him To Do It'._

 _Well_ , the voice said with scorn, _at least you're halfway acknowledging that you're irrationally prejudiced against disembodied voices, not many people are mature enough to do that_.

 _Oh come on!_ Ozland couldn't really think of any other responses.

 _You enjoyed that cheesecake, but you're denying yourself the joy of eating another cheesecake, just because you got told to by a disembodied voice_ , the voice continued, seemingly amused. _Do you need to hear 'Simon says' before you do anything? Take a look at that blueberry cheesecake over there, for instance - the company went out of business in 1968 in your world, so I found a world where they didn't. Luxury cheesecakes. Artisan cheesecakes. Full-cream milk, real blueberries. They used to go for fifty pounds a –_

 _Out out OUT, get_ out _of my head, RIGHT now_.

 _Alright, alright_ , the voice said, clearly wounded, _I'll just –_

"Ah, Ozland," Mrs Weasley tapped her cheek, "you'll go with Fred and George. And if they get up to any _funny stuff_ , make sure to tell me," she added, lowering her voice.

"Fred, George," she shouted at the twins (George was shoulder-deep in salted macadamia nuts, and Fred was egging him on to go deeper), "Ozland's coming with you, and in Merlin's name, if he gets _lost_ , it's on _you_ two to explain to Headmaster Dumbledore."

George dusted himself off, licking each of his fingers. "He won't get lost – "

" – unless he, you know, _gets lost_."

George turned to Fred. "That was a decent pun, and it's _your_ fault for messing up the execution."

"Mrs Weasley, is this really something I should risk coming along for?" asked Ozland, who was beginning to reconsider the shopping trip.

"Young man, it's no more dangerous than any other infinite supermarket - so long as you don't go past the butter with the purple spots and _treat the disembodied voice in your head with respect and give thoughtful consideration to whatever it says_ \- " ( _How odd_ , Ozland thought, _her lips were weirdly out of sync when she said that last bit_ ) " - and I promised Albus we'd keep an eye on you, so that's that." She checked her watch. "Ten past twelve, we're making good time. Be back here within the hour – and if it takes any longer, remind Fred and George to send a Patronus."

Fred and George waved goodbye. As soon as she was gone, they whipped out their wands, and, after doing a few complicated swirly motions, tapped them to the ground and to one another's shoulders, and said " _Olenduvõrknit_ " in synchrony. Ozland watched, fascinated, as a red thread appeared, linking all the places that they'd touched, swaying gently like spider silk. As they began walking, the thread extended itself.

"That's one of ours – " said Fred.

" – so keep it to yourself. We can trust you, right?"

"I can barely remember it!" Ozland protested, struggling to keep up (the Weasley twins were rather taller than him).

"Some child of prophecy," George murmured, grinning.

"Wait, what?"

"Dumbledore didn't tell you?" said Fred.

"Um, he might have suggested it really subtly but no he didn't tell me."

"Then if he didn't tell you, you oughtn't to know and you'll probably find out later," remarked Fred sensibly.

"We _could_ tell you," George added, "but it'd mess up the fabric of reality, and the Ministry'll fine us a hundred Galleons for that if we do it again."

They came to a stop beside a row of edible roses. "Anyway," Fred interrupted Ozland before he could respond, "it's simple. Hold out your wand."

Ozland held out his wand.

"No, not like that you twonk."

Ozland held out his wand differently.

"Yes, just like that. Now all you have to do is a fixed – by that I mean keep your wrist in the same place – twirl widdershins – counterclockwise, if you like – twice – doesn't matter how quick, then stab at the centre of your wand-circle, do a wiggly zig-zag thing down the middle, inside your wand-circle – that bit's not actually too important so just do it however you want – and say 'olenduvõrknit'. You have to pronounce that _really_ precisely – the 'o' in the 'duvõrk' isn't like a normal 'o' – you have to round your _lips_ like an 'o', but you have to keep your tongue up – but not touching the roof of your mouth – just near your teeth. Syllable-stress doesn't matter."

Ozland went over the motions in his head. "Um, why do I have to be the one do this?"

Fred and George looked at one another, and then Fred casually brought out a small velvety box, snapping it open. Everything around them went utterly silent, as if the box was sucking in all the noise. "Alright," he said, "this is a Secret Box. Anything we say when it's open stays secret between whoever hears it, and if you can't give it away. By 'can't', I mean you really don't want to find out what happens if you _try_ to. That includes what we're saying right now. So just to be sure, we have a Secret Box, you know what a Secret Box is and how to cast the spell we outlined before, and we did something other than efficiently find all of the things on the shopping list, engage you in friendly conversation, and come back as soon as we could."

 _That's actually incredibly powerful._ "But why do I have to – "

"Because it's a soul-tracer which only works for your own soul," said Fred, grimly, snapping shut the Box.

"I don't get why you need that to be a secret," Ozland said, puzzled.

" _Accio calamari_ ," Fred enunciated, and a packet of squid flew from the air and into his hands. "Unregistered soul magic is twenty years in Azkaban. It's daft, and I won't say any more. Now remember – fixed twirl, twice clockwise, centre-stab, zig-zag down the middle, 'o-len-du-võrk-nit' – "

" – with the tongue up for the 'o' sound in 'vork'. Got it, lemme just visualise it first." Ozland listed out the sequence in his head, then did it again, and then for a third time. He held out his wand, closed his eyes, imagined his wand, imagined his hand moving with the wand. _Fixed twirl, twice clockwise, centre-stab, zig-zag down the middle_. He almost shouted the incantation in his head.

For some reason, he felt oddly exhilarated, but breathless, at the same time. "Okay, right. Now I'll do it for real."

Fred and George were staring at him, standing stock-still. "Merlin," Fred murmured. "No wand movement, no words." He coughed. "Right, well, just tap it to the ground and you're sorted."

Ozland complied, confused. A purplish line appeared. "What does it mean?"

George scratched his chin. "Casting a spell, with no wand movement and no words – it's not unheard of. But it's spiffing stuff, you know."

"Could be the concentrated ambient magic," Fred said without conviction. "Anyway, we've got fifty minutes left so we're going to have to hurry. _Skappakurg_." A plaited basket popped into existence in his hands.

They broke into a jogging pace, twisting and turning around corners, with Fred and George saying ' _Accio everything on the shopping list_ ' at regular intervals. The Supermarket was a labyrinth, and Ozland realised what Mrs Weasley had meant when she warned the twins about him getting lost.

The items on the shelves began to look less and less familiar – Ozland passed by an entire section of candied spiders (Fred and George grabbed a few, "for Ron", they said, without elaboration), whale-meat on a stick, floating colourful pyramids, and then –

"Jesus fucking Christ."

"What?" said Fred and George simultaneously.

Ozland was standing in front of an entire shelf of chocolate. "What do you mean 'what?' – do you know how much this is all _worth_?" he said, incredulously. "Oh, unless this isn't real cocoa – that would make sense." He picked up a packet, turning over to the ingredients. He shook his head. "No way. No _fucking_ way."

Fred turned to his counterpart. "He's gone bonkers," he said, shaking his head. "No, really – what's the deal? It's just chocolate."

He looked at them, flabbergasted, and began shoving as many as he could into his jacket and pants. "This is _eighty percent_ cocoa – _bullion_ standard."

"Absolutely certifiable," muttered George, audibly. "We in range?"

Fred pulled out a walkie-talkie. There was a hiss of static. "Not yet."

Ozland ignored them, using a pen-knife to slice holes into his jacket so that he could stuff in a few more bars. By the time he'd finished, a quarter of his body-weight was in chocolate, and Fred and George were nothing but trailing red threads. It would be annoying and embarrassing, but if he could lug them home, it would easily be worth it - 'it' meaning some ridiculous amount of money. He picked up one, idly looking at the purple packaging. "Rowntree," he read aloud, totally unnecessarily. His voice echoed slightly.

Tearing off the wrapping and biting into the chocolate, he started running after the Weasley twins' trail. _Mystery solved — the Supermarket gets its stock from parallel universes or something._

He stopped, panting. Around him were what looked like TV dinners, but instead of chicken and potato and greens, there were bricks. Just a single brick, wrapped in plastic, in each one — covered in gravy. The language looked vaguely like Hebrew.

The section after it was filled with thirty-foot-long tentacles, frozen and bound together with rope. _Jesus, why the hell are Fred and George way out here?_

Ozland walked further, straining his ears, hearing a voice from not very far. "Fantastic ideas as always, Gred and Forge. As soon as we get ahold of a thousand-tonne block of stone, we'll try it out." There was a pause, interrupted by strange insectile clicking sounds. "Good to hear it, mate. Now, to hold up our end of the deal . . . "

He peeked around the next shelf, seeing a circular clearing that eventually branched out into six different paths. Fred stood in the middle. Up to one ear, he held a walkie-talkie. Out of the other, a snake-like wire that terminated in what looked to be a record player, except with a dictionary instead of a vinyl disc. George was rummaging through another shelf, looking intrigued.

" . . . and when the prankee opens the door, the bucket of water falls onto them, getting them soaking wet. Brilliant stuff, innit?" Another burst of insectile clicking sounds. The dictionary flung open, pages flicking back and forth in a blur of paper. "Yeah, we thought so too." More clicks and more pages. "Okay, you two take care. Always a pleasure. Bye." George turned off the walkie-talkie. "Suckers. Fred, what's your estimate?"

"About five thousand leagues north-north-west," said Fred. "We could probably take apart one of dad's cars, get all the pieces through the door, rebuild it, stock up on concentrated thaumic fluid, and be there and back in a week . . . and we've got ten minutes left - shite, we can still make it back."

George pulled out the wire from his ear, twirled his wand, and the dictionary-record-player began folding in on itself like an origami city struck by an earthquake.

At the same time, Fred pulled out a long roll of what looked like a Persian carpet from his right pocket, throwing it out with a flourish. It floated above the floor, quite steadily, and Fred and George jumped on, lying belly-down. "Oi, Ozland, get on and hold on."

Ozland tentatively stepped onto the carpet, which rippled underneath him, lying down and holding onto the front. "Jesus, is this is a flying carpet?"

As Fred and George stroked and patted it, murmuring encouraging words, the carpet slowly began lifting up into the air, before accelerating forward. Oz realised hadn't really been able to appreciate what 'infinite' meant until he saw the gray horizon all around him. "Oi, don't hold onto the front - that's for steering," said George. Ozland obediently grabbed onto the fur. "And to answer your question, no." George rolled over, digging into his pockets, before taking out the Secret Box again. His face was mischievous as he opened the lid. The roar of wind around them stopped, although he could still feel it on his face. "We applied a broomstick Charm while it was all rolled up, and it worked. So you could say it was a carpet which we tricked into thinking was a broomstick. _Real_ flying carpets bend the space-time continuum around them to move around, that's how you tell." He closed the Box, and the wind resumed.

 **#######**

Mrs Weasley had been suspicious, but Ozland hadn't given any indication of anything out-of-the-ordinary happening, although his definition of 'ordinary' had been adjusted substantially.

Out in the birdbath store, he reluctantly handed over the chocolate to her to keep in her expanded purse, and in the process of looking through all of his pockets, he noticed that, nestled snugly in his sleeve, was a blueberry cheesecake.

 **#######**

Madam Malkin's was fairly ordinary apart from the self-animated measuring tapes — but then again, the Supermarket had also been fairly ordinary, apart from the fact that it was infinitely large, and tried to telepathically convince him to eat more cheesecakes.

Ozland tuned into the various voices drifting across the stalls next to him.

"Look, Hagrid," came one voice, "what about the Dark Lords from Ilvermorny, or Beauxbatons, or Durmstrang, or for that matter, the Comintern Magic Academy — all I'm saying," the voice went conciliatory, "is that the statement 'All Dark Lords came from Slytherin', let alone 'You'll become a Dark Lord if you go to Slytherin' is subject to, uh, Anglocentric bias."

"Aye, I can see tha'," came a much gruffer voice.

"And, you know," the other voice rushed on, "how many Dark Lords have there _been_ , anyway? Not many, I'll bet. There's simply not enough data to draw sweeping conclusions like that — it would be like, um, say I had two goldfish, and say one of them dies, and the next day, there's a war in the Middle-East. And then another one dies a few years later, and there's another war in the Middle-East. Does that mean the deaths of my goldfish have anything to do with war in the Middle-East? Well, only two goldfish have died — that's nowhere near enough goldfish to draw any conclusions about any correlations between the deaths of goldfish and wars in the Middle-East. Or let's pretend that it really _is_ the case that going to Slytherin, say, _triples_ your likelihood of becoming a Dark Lord — if the prior probability is, um, six Dark Lords in the past five hundred years, and there've been twenty-five thousand Hogwarts students, that just means the likelihood of becoming a Dark Lord only went from 0.24% to 0.72%. ' _Triple_ ' might sound _huge_ , but in reality it only means the likelihood of that student becoming a Dark Lord increased by 0.48% and that's _tiny_ — does any of this make sense?"

There was a long pause.

"No."

"Ah, forget it then. How does this sound: I'll try and not end up in Slytherin — and if I do, I'll try to not become a Dark Lord."

"An' if yeh become a Dark Lord?"

" . . . I'll be nice to my enemies, minimise casualties, and abide by international law?"

Nothing else noteworthy happened in the store.

 **#######**

The bookstore was also mostly ordinary, in the way that Ozland had come to realise was the case for most of wizarding Britain. Once you got down to it, it was just people jumping through puddles and wearing silly pointy hats. The fact that none of it made an ounce of sense didn't really matter. A firm principle Ozland had abided by ever since he'd thought of it an hour ago, was that if something in the world didn't make any sense to him, it was him at fault, not the world. All he knew for certain was that somehow it all worked out, that he'd figure out the specifics later, and that he'd use the specifics to either take over the universe or settle down somewhere and become a dentist in Surrey.

"Apparently some of the books here scream and bite you if you open them the wrong way," remarked a girl, who'd politely shook his hand and introduced herself as Hermione Granger. She'd been going through a reference book of some sort, with the titles of other reference books in them, neatly inscribing numbers between 1 and 3,856 beside them in red felt — presumably in the order she was planning to read them. They were in the middle of a long, partly-lit corridor with bookshelves on either side.

"Cats do that too," Ozland said, feeling quite stupid.

She frowned. "If you open them the wrong way?"

"Well, I'd think so."

"Mhm," she mhm'd, turning back to her meta-reference book.

"Honestly," Ozland began, who'd been struck by a burning desire to say something else absurd, "anyone who opens a book the wrong way _deserves_ to be screamed at and bitten, in my opinion."

"What if it took their fingers off?" said the girl rather nonchalantly, without pausing.

Ozland doubled down. "Even if it took their whole hand off. Their whole arm, even."

She marked down '486', and then scribbled it out, writing '487' instead. A flash of annoyance passed over her face. "Where does it go, do you think?"

"Where does what go?"

"The finger-pieces. Do you suppose it has a book-stomach to digest them?"

"I suppose," supposed Ozland. "But then again, I suppose it could just spit them out. Or maybe," he supposed further, with a speculative air, "the book _absorbs_ the finger-pieces as new material, turning them into extra chapters, or adding unnecessary words to sentences to make the book longer."

"Maybe," said the girl (from her tone, Ozland couldn't tell if she was being genuine or viciously mocking him), "maybe the font just gets larger and larger until they end up in the large print section."

"Then all the large print books would be covered in blood, wouldn't they?"

"Some of them _are_ covered in blood." She flicked over to another page.

"Oh." _That's a bit worrying._

"Professor McGonagall says the defense mechanism instills healthy respect for books."

Ozland leaned back against the bookshelf behind him, but felt it come unbalanced, even though it was, itself, leaning against a wall, and hastily straightened himself in the hope that he hadn't caused any permanent structural damage. "Ah, you've met her, then?"

"She introduced me to," she waved her hand about, "all of _this_ , just a few hours ago, actually."

. . .

"That can't be right," said Ozland automatically, his grip on normalcy beginning to loosen, "um, unless by a few hours ago you mean only after twelve. Dumbledore said they were dealing with a Type Three something-or-other at Hogwarts so they needed to dash, and that's why they left me with the Weasleys at twelve."

The girl looked up from her book for the first time in ten minutes. "Well I'm not sure who _you_ were talking to," she said, evidently thinking it over, "because she came over to my house at eleven, we left Ollivanders at eleven thirty, Madam Malkins finished the measurements for my robes at twelve . . . and it was twelve thirty when we finished buying a trunk, and twelve forty-five when we finished buying Potions equipment, and well, she left me _here_ about a quarter of an hour ago saying she needed a good drink, and said she'd be back within the hour."

Ozland buried his face in his hands. "Just when I thought I'd figured everything out. Oh, hold on. No, it's obvious: she has a sister who's also a Professor and also teaches at Hogwarts. There we go, no time-travel shenanigans necessary."

Hermione opened her mouth to reply just as Professor McGonagall appeared around the corner, striding down the corridor and tutting. "Really, young lady — "

"Um, Professor – " began Ozland.

She stopped, and raised her eyebrows. "Do I know you?"

"Yes," said Ozland, who was mildly confused at this new development, "you introduced me to the wizarding world a few hours ago. Shouldn't you be dealing with the Type Three florkpurple superintelligence thing at Hogwarts? It sounded fairly serious."

Professor McGonagall looked alarmed. "Who did you hear that from?"

"Dumbledore."

"And when did you hear it?"

"Twelve o'clock today," he answered, frustratedly, "when you two left me at the Weasleys." The thought occurred to him that he could be speaking to Professor McGonagall's body-double.

"Ah," said Professor McGonagall, seeming even more alarmed. She turned to Hermione. "I'll just be a few moments more, dear, and then we'll go and fetch your Astronomy equipment," she said, before suddenly disappearing.

"That," said Ozland, "was weird as hell."

Hermione nodded in the very abstracted way that people doing numbers in their head do. "Ye-es."

He coughed. "Anyway, I've got all my books, so I'd best be going. I guess we'll, um, see one another at Hogwarts."

She looked mildly disappointed for some reason. "Alright."

Ozland tripped on an uneven bit of carpet as he made his way down the corridor.

 **#######**

The main area of the bookstore was thick with people, all of whom seemed to be ecstatically clamouring around, well, something or someone. It was difficult to say, in the same way that it would be difficult to say what a given whirlpool was _whirling_ around. The screaming and bursts of light suggested two possibilities: either that someone was a celebrity being assaulted by photographers, or a central figure in a civil war which had recently erupted between Horticulture and Self-Help. Everything was humid and loud, and it was no wonder Hermione had chosen to escond herself in a section, which, to Ozland's knowledge, only had the reference volumes of every book that could ever exist in alphabetical order, except that the publishers had stopped at Volume QMXIIX due to poor sales. The one he'd picked up had started with the fascinating title of 'aaaaabaaaaa by aa' and, after a couple thousand pages, ended with the even more fascinating-sounding 'aaaaabbghlk by qz'. (It was useful if you already knew what book you were looking for, but not much else — which went a long way toward explaining the lack of foot-traffic. On the other hand, that 'else' was 'a way to torture someone without leaving any physical marks.')

He quickly found Ron, who had relegated himself to the sidelines of whatever was going on, maintaining a wide peopleless space around him by sitting back in an an armchair and holding up to his face a book whose cover read 'Treat Your Own Incurable Infectious Incurable Diseases (Yes, They're Really That Incurable)' in intense green letters.

"Stand back, I have Arcturian whalepox – oh," Ron said, looking at him more closely and putting down the book, "come to get away from Lockhart, too, have you?"

"The author, right?" This was something he was fairly confident about, having passed the rather well-stocked Lockhart Section.

"More than that," Ron went on, sullenly, "he's also a Memory-Charming psycho who got sentenced by the Wizengamot to permanent ravishment – er, banishment – "

" – about to say, permanent ravishment doesn't sound too bad – "

" – so he went to work for the Triad," Ron continued, glaring at him, "and obviously he did dodgy magic stuff with them – 'cos he ended up in the Executer Council and came back ten years later completely off the hook cos' he donated a few hundred thousand Galleons to the Ministry. 'S like everybody's bloody forgotten already. At least, that's what mum says. Oh," he added, as if only suddenly remembering, "and the bugger'll be teaching this year, too. Anyway, we might as well – "

Just then, a hush descended over the bookstore, and a trembling, high-pitched, almost _wailing_ voice reached their ears — it sounded oddly familiar, and by the fifth word, Ozland had nailed down the owner of the voice as Fred (or George, or potentially the third twin, William, who they'd insisted Mr and Mrs Weasley kept in the attic and fed a steady diet of fish-heads). They hadn't heard all of it, since the beginning had been masked by the tremendous noise of the crowd, but the bit they heard went like this: " . . . so you see, it's so, so expensive — the treatments for the non-transmittable version of Arcturian whalepox . . . "

Curiosity piqued (and then some), Ozland and Ron made their way through the crowd, until they could see what was happening. What was happening was . . . he was tempted to say two blonde copies of Ginny had made their way up to a small podium and were posing for photographs with a man who he presumed was Gilderoy Lockhart, but that probably wasn't it, except for the last part.

"And your names?" asked a reporter. (At least, Ozland assumed she was a reporter – if she wasn't a reporter, she was certainly going for a reporter _look_.)

"Georgina and Frederica Sneasley," said the girls, again in an annoyingly high-pitched voice. One of them coughed, very loudly and very unsubtly, before doubling over and wheezing. A murmur of sympathy went through the crowd.

"Well well well," said the assumed Gilderoy Lockhart, rather magnanimously, "how does this sound? I'll give your family _all_ of the required titles for this year's Defense Against The Dark Arts And Muggle Studies, completely free of - "

"Defense Against The Dark Arts And Muggle Studies?" Ozland hissed to Ron, as the man continued to slather banalities on top of platitudes.

"Yeah," Ron hissed back, "You-Know-Who put a curse on the Defense position a while back, so they keep combining classes and making frogs Professors and doing all sorts of nutty stuff to get it off. Hold on, why are we hissing?"

"I don't know," said Ozland in a normal voice, "it just seemed natural."

" - and might I ask _how_ many of your other siblings are in need of my full book set?"

"Forty," said Georgina Sneasley. "Actually wait, fifty."

A stunned silence followed.

"Just put it in the potato sack, thanks," Frederica Sneasley chimed in.

Lockhart spluttered for a moment, counted out fifty book-sets wrapped in maroon ribbons, placing them one by one into the sack, with a faintly disgusted smile.

As Ozland watched in wonderment, somebody tapped on his shoulder. He turned around, seeing Fred and George.

"So what's all this, then?" said George, looking genuinely curious.

"Um," Ozland looked up to the podium, where the two girls were posing for photographs, "I thought I knew but I'm not sure now."

Ron seemed to have had a similar reaction. He wasn't lost for words — he had all the words, but the order they were supposed to go in seemed to evade him at that moment.

The twins looked just as confused as they were.

"Um," ummed Ozland again, "well, I'll tell you what _happened_ and leave the conjecture out of it." He told them.

"Alright," said Fred. "Seems obvious enough. We pulled off a fantastic prank and conned Lockhart out of hundreds of Galleons' worth of books, Time-Turned back to give ourselves an alibi, and Obliviated one another."

"Or," said George, "we, and by 'we' I mean us, standing here right now, haven't actually done it yet - "

"Wait, what?"

" - but at some point in the future we'll Time-Turn back and do it."

"That . . . " he was about to say 'doesn't make any sense', but there had to be _some_ kind of internally-consistent logic to all of it. "What if you don't do it?"

Fred and George shook their heads. "Honestly, take it from us – "

" – it's best not to go up against the underlying order of reality. Except on Sunday. Besides," George gesticulated in the direction of the two girls, who were taking questions from various journalists, "we've already done it," he grinned, "it'll be a bloody cake-walk."

 **#######**

As they walked through the Trunk Emporium (for Ozland's sake — the Weasleys already had trunks for the most part, and seemed determined to give him advice, as if they were helping him select his first car), Fred and George, having recently morphed from little blonde girls to lanky, red-headed teenagers, filled him on what had happened. "The trick," they'd said, "is leaving it right to the last minute. Then Time gets _really_ desperate and arranges all sorts of weird coincidences."

That time, as they idly walked about in the street outside the bookstore, a broom-rider collided with another broom-rider, causing a brown parcel to fall onto George's head, which contained enough Polyjuice Potion for both of them to maintain a Polyjuiced form for four hours. They realised at that point, that for whatever reason, a strand of Ginny's hair was stuck to Fred's robe, put two and two together, downed the Polyjuice with the hair, and applied the Colour-Changing Charm to their own hair to turn it blonde. Then Fred accidentally spilt some of the Polyjuice on the ground.

The spill pattern spelt out the word 'Arcturian whalepox'.

They spilt some more, and got three paragraphs of detailed instructions.

They spilt even more, and got a sentence reading 'Do this again and I'll sock both of you in the balls.'

The rest, apparently, had gone very well.

"No, not that one."

"Why not that one?" Ozland asked Mrs Weasley for the umpteenth time.

She knelt down, pointing at a series of subtle scratches along the base. "This one's been through at least two owners, or one owner who had it for a while. You can't fix scratches with ordinary repair Charms, you see. Interior expansions degrade over time – if you're not careful, it'll collapse into a singularity with you and your belongings inside."

The trunk salesman, having been busy with someone else up until that moment, stepped in. "An interesting choice, young man," he opened with, before breaking into a well-oiled spiel. " _This_ was Paddaryll Cymeglen's trunk, who worked in the Department of Land Expansions and mapped two hundred universes up until his, er, disappearance. Well-loved and full of adventure, this trunk is."

Ozland's mind had gotten stuck on one particular word. "Disappearance?"

"Oh," said the salesman, airily, "some say he and his belongings collapsed into a singularity, but the rumour going about is he hiccuped during a dimensional ritual and ended up somewhere far off the Charted Zone. In any case, this trunk has been revamped, recharged, and cleaned very thoroughly. And we've had an exorcist come in, just to be sure. Clean in both the material _and_ spiritual realm."

"I think I'll have to pass – "

"And I forgot to add, this certainly isn't an ordinary internally-expanded trunk – "

"They all say that," Mrs Weasley huffed.

" – in fact, it's not an internal expansion at all." He went into a theatrical hush. "Cymeglen made a direct link between our universe and his unregistered house in Cymeglen-551J."

"None of this makes any sense," complained Ozland very quietly. "I just want to buy a trunk and get this over and done with."

Mrs Weasley seemed intrigued. "He did all of this _before_ the passing of the registration laws?" she asked, carefully.

"Indeed."

"And it's eighty Galleons?"

"The same."

She paused. "Is there anything, you know, _wrong_ with Cymeglen-551J?"

"It's eighty fathoms out from the Official Registrar, so you can't be expecting Ministry emergency services, if that's what you mean."

"What's the divergence?" Mrs Weasley demanded.

Ozland folded his arms, glancing around the store. _Of all the things I thought I'd be doing today, I wasn't expecting 'buying a universe' to be one of them._

"Something to do with giant potatoes and people speaking Norse. You'll have to Floo the Ministry assessor, I'll send you his details."

Mrs Weasley tapped her cheek. "We'll take a look inside. And it'll have to be forty Galleons."

The salesman looked pained. "Alright, alright."

 **#######**

They'd ended up in a gloomy, dusty room after coming down the stairs, stuffed with old furniture.

Mrs Weasley had murmured what was supposed to be a simple torch Charm, but instead, a faint, pure musical note had rung through the air, grown more and more intense, and then cut off abruptly. After a few seconds of silence, the glassy orbs that they'd noticed before near the ceiling, flickered soundlessly, and then began warmly glowing. She brought out her wand, firing off a series of spells. " _Dzevzgalov_. _Point Me_. _Löciseng_. Alright, we're a mile from the Thames, and North is _that_ way," she said, finally, looking bewildered.

" _Potatofind_ ," incanted George. "There's a – "

"That's not a spell," said Ron, stumbling over a pea-green armchair.

"Is too," shot Fred.

" – fifteen-tonne potato under this house."

" _Potatofind_ ," said Mrs Weasley, copying his wand-motion. "Merlin, there really _is_ a fifteen-tonne potato underneath . . . underneath the one next to us, too. Mr Forksworth," she said, addressing the salesman, who looked distinctly alarmed, "are you _sure_ you don't remember anything else?"

Mr Forksworth furled his eyebrows in thought. "There was something about a famine, but I'm afraid I'm really not sure. And I'm certain the Ministry assessor talked about vikings — really, you'll have to ask him. By the way," he said, nodding at Ozland, "the house is yours, too. Sixty Galleons?"

"Um, sure – "

"Alright, just sign this, this, and this. Fabulous. And we'll just have to change the blood wards. _Aithnedìonffuil_." Something in the air in front of Ozland _sharpened_ into an upward curving point, like a glass mountain, becoming more and more distinct until it was a jutting crystal.

"Just reach out and prick your finger on the tip to seal the wards. Give it a strong tap."

Ozland did exactly that, and winced as blood blossomed from his index finger. It seemed to disperse through the air in vivid, roiling curls, giving the whole room a faint red tinge before dissipating.

Mrs Weasley and the salesman congratulated him, and Fred and George clapped him on the back — but he wasn't really paying attention, because he'd just noticed that the room around him was filled with trunks.

 **#######**


	5. Ch5 – A Cassette

**AN/1: okay I have a new schedule where I try to post every two weeks on a Wednesday and even though that hasn't been working out I'll try to stick to it.**

 **AN/2: After this chapter goes up I'll have enough potential plot-hooks to last until the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium woohoo**

 **#######**

CHAPTER FIVE

 **#######**

 _The Daily Mail_

GALACTIC WHODUNNIT: SCIENTISTS FIND INEXPLICABLE VOID IN UNIVERSE

March 1, 1983

After analysing the latest data from the Rockefeller Wide-Array Moon Telescope, scientists at the Royal Observatory have reported the discovery of a "perfectly spherical void" in the middle of the Virgo Cluster, where matter is not only more sparse, as has been observed in other voids, but "totally absent". The newly-discovered void has been named the Tibbles Void, after the late Walter Rockefeller's cat, who recently came into the possession of his enormous fortune.

Photographs of the edges of the Tibbles Void show galaxies "cleanly bisected", still more torn apart due to an unknown violent cosmic event [...]

 **#######**

Hermione's parents had always enjoyed a good protest – as long as they were small, quiet, and didn't accomplish anything they could indirectly hold responsibility for. This was one of the many areas where Hermione differed from her parents. She'd gone to protests out of an indirect obligation to whales, trees, and elderly people, none of whom presumably could advance their interests without her help.

On the seventh of May 1991, it was drizzling and the grey clouds were milling about in the sky, as if waiting for the weather-police to come along and arrest them for loitering. People were milling about on the ground, setting up stands and hurriedly finishing their placards, waiting for the demonstration to reach critical mass. A homeless man sat at the edge of the water fountain with a newspaper unfolded in his hands. 'FTSE FALLS ANOTHER 2%' – the title had been the same yesterday, and the day before that. Policemen stood at the fringes of the Square, looking uncertain.

"Hermione?" came Anita's voice from behind her.

Everything went into a half-second loop. The pigeons flapped their wings, and flapped them and flapped and flapped. The newspaper turned over in the homeless man's hands, and then jumped back to the start, again and again and again. Everyone around her was walking, and then they were back to were they were, and then they started walking. There was a low buzz that she hadn't noticed before, like ten trillion electronic hornets all descending on her. There was suddenly a second, reddish moon in the sky.

She turned around, but somehow she stayed in the same place because she could see into the back of her head and her squishy, reddish brain like cross-sections had been cut into it with a butcher's knife and her hair flailing about in a loop and she was a big trail like on the terminal screen when everything froze up and you dragged the mouse across and it made a big mouse trail behind it. She walked forward until she could see Anita's face, but Anita was melting like the time she'd put a little green soldier in a microwave and watched it collapse into a puddle and begin to burn vicious, noxious smoke. Her pointy nose was drooping and her blue eyes were glassy and dull and started leaking out of her face. Her mouth stayed in the same place, but her lips were slugs and her teeth had gone shiny and reflective, a chrome finish.

"I'm dead," Hermione said, and suddenly there were hornets everywhere, stinging and biting her flesh, tearing it off in chunks and carrying it away. They were laughing.

"No," said Anita's slug-lips. " _I'm_ dead. I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead

 **#######**

ELKNIWT'S ASTRONOMY SUPPLIES, 1511 NOGAID ALLEY, LONDON

Cymeglen's trunk had been filled with other trunks. This was surprising because according to just about everyone else, the room was filled with old furniture. Ozland asked many times just to be sure, and then had to defend himself from allegations of trunk-madness, whatever that was.

After having afternoon tea, they puddlejumped to the faded exterior of Elkniwt's Astronomy Supplies on 1511 Nogaid Alley. A tattered poster was stuck to the door, reading 'CLEARANCE SALE', then below in smaller letters 'IT'S ALL FREE' and then in even smaller letters 'you bastards'.

They walked in, and found that the owner had apparently gone to a great effort to make the store look thematically appropriate by removing all the lighting fixtures and leaving the entire store in total darkness.

"So," said Ozland, "why's it called Nogaid Alley?"

"Alright," said George, "allow me to set the scene. February 5, 1981. An enterprising Muggleborn salesman by the name of –"

"It's another universe someone busted a hole into," interrupted Ron, tersely.

"– William Dowpill wants to set up a crumpet-stand, but he doesn't have a license."

"Ooh," Fred oohed. "And Ron, every interruption is another candied spider."

Ron shrank back.

"So what does he do? He casts a land-expansion ritual near the edge of Diagon's dimensional pocket, opens up our dimension to blankspace, and sets up his crumpet-stand in it, operating on the, may I say, ironclad logic that the Ministry has no jurisdiction over blankspace, since it technically doesn't exist."

"And what happened next?" asked Fred, hushed.

George gestured expansively with his arms. "The crumpet-stand . . . acted as a _seed_ – hold on, no, a _key_ – a _key_ that opened a door into another universe in the apartment below. _But_ , now here's the thing – the version of William Dowpill in that sideways-universe _also_ casted a land-expansion ritual, and so did the other one the next universe over. _Infinitely_."

"The strangest thing!" exclaimed Fred.

"And eight universes down . . . there was a universe where pointy hats were considered a form of sexual deviancy, so the Ministry of Magic for _that_ universe sealed itself off, ending the chain. Fifty thousand witches and wizards, all stranded sideways through hyperspace, their own dimensional pockets sealed off from the outside world and glued together with ours."

"A tragedy!"

"So we fined them for four hundred years of unpaid taxes, copyright violations, and construction without permits, and backed it up with the Cup of Magic. Oh, and we put a Jinx on all of them to give them funny accents."

"And _that_ ," ended Fred, "is how Nogaid Alley got its name."

Ginny clapped sarcastically.

"Um, I imagine they wouldn't be too happy about any of that. Being debt peons."

"Doesn't matter," said Ron, "they're not _real_ , anyway."

Everyone except for Ozland nodded.

"Um," said Ozland, making a resolution to start sentences with 'um' less, "I might be missing something obvious here, but why is that exactly?"

Ron looked at him as if he'd not only grown another head, but as if that additional head had grown tiny bat wings and begun lifting him up into the air. "Er, they don't have souls, their universes don't have prophecies – and that means they don't have free will –"

"How do you know they don't have souls?"

"'Cos you can't sacrifice their souls in rituals. You can sacrifice their life-force, but there's nothing else to sacrifice. First thing the Ministry tried when we opened up a Gateway."

"Okay, now what about the prophecies and the free will thing?"

Ron sniffed. "Well it's obvious, innit? They don't have any prophecies so they don't have free will."

"A prophecy as in . . . a prediction about the future that has to come true?"

Ron nodded, taking on a more serious tone, as if he was giving an answer for an exam. "Prophecies are the motor-force of history – without prophecies, the only reason why things would happen is because other things happened before them, with all of those things happening as material interactions. But since those material interactions converge on a particular outcome in accordance with prophecy, that implies that free will exists to guide those material interactions towards that outcome. Therefore, sideways-people are biological automatons."

"That's twisty and makes no sense," Ozland wanted to say, and then realised that he'd actually said it.

A shrug from Ron. "Got me a EE in the Land Expansion course, so it can't be all wrong."

"That's the kind of thing I'd make up if I wanted to justify the . . . sideways-peoples' position as eternal debt-peons."

"That's just how it is," shrugged Fred, seeming unconcerned, "might as well not feel bad about it all. Be happy, feel good, and be feel happy-good, that's my life philosophy."

"Where's Mum?" said Ron, knotting his eyebrows.

"She found a cube-shaped globe of the Earth and she's flipping it for a Galleon in the universe with the weird numbers," said Ginny. "At least that's what she said. I'm pretty sure she was lying, since we don't _need_ to flip things anymore."

"On that note," said Fred, "or at least one of those notes – whatever one is closest to what I'm about to talk about – the owner probably put a bunch of cool Curses on his merch, and we're going to need to investigate for investigatory purposes. Ginny, stay at the front – otherwise you'll get lost or have your fingers bitten off by Cursed doorknobs, or both, hopefully."

"I wouldn't – even if I wanted to, which I don't. Gwynne's talking to me over the windspraek."

"Look, Ginny – you don't have to invent imaginary friends to impress us."

"You . . . you two _literally_ met her last year at the Slug Party, what the _fuck_."

"Yes, Ginny," Fred said, affecting a sympathetic tone, "we _definitely_ met her," he elbowed George, "didn't we, George?"

"Yeah," said George, "shook hands and everything. She was definitely, you know, physically there."

Ginny stormed off.

"Alright, back here in fifteen? Catch you later, Ozzy, Ronniekins."

There was a stretch of silence, during which they walked by a long row of telescopes, all jammed into a brick wall.

"What do you ween that's for?"

"Let's take a look-see," Ozland said, tripping on an uneven bit of carpet.

Ron grabbed his shoulder. "Yeah, mate – _not_ a good idea. You don't just _take a look-see_ through a telescope in the back of a forgotten store abandoned by the dimensional-twin of a mad store-owner . . . oh Merlin, I think I've seen this in a play or something." He held up a finger. "It's on the tip of my tongue."

Ozland waited patiently for over a minute.

" _Jungles of Aphrodite_ ," Ron triumphantly burst out. "They look through the telescope, and before they know it, they get sucked in and get put on Venus."

"What then?"

"I fell asleep after that, but the twins said everyone died. I think the main lesson is, don't go looking into random telescopes until you know for sure that they're not Cursed or haven't had eldritch magic done on them." Ron did a twirly-loopy thing with his wand (Ozland wondered whether wand-motions had any pattern or structure) before pointing at the telescopes and ending it with " _Revelare maledicta_."

Nothing happened.

Ron scratched his head. "You know what would really be useful? If they started glowing bright green. Then I'd be able to tell the difference between 'not cursed' and 'I messed up the spell'. Good work, there, Infectus, you bloody brilliant spellcrafter," he sighed. "Alright, now for the, er, eldritch magic detection spell. _Verdobrillo_."

The telescopes began glowing bright green.

Ozland stared. "Eldritch or not-eldritch?"

" . . . I don't really know the spell for detecting eldritch magic, that was just the spell for making things glow bright green," Ron admitted. "I'm sorry, I needed a win."

" _Silencio_ ," came a soft voice from behind them. A yellowish ray of light struck Ron, who had begun to dodge. Unfortunately, the direction he dodged in was upwards. Ozland swung around as Ron began vigorously mouthing words for some reason, only to see a blonde girl about a half-head shorter than him wrapped in a knitted quilt.

"Are you from the outside?" she asked, very normally.

"From the what?" Ozland reached for his wand, but realised he didn't know anything except for the spell the twins had cast back in the Supermarket except that it was useless for defending himself and he'd forgotten it, and eventually he awkwardly slung his hand by his side.

The girl turned her head, seeming to peer into the gloom.

The quiet stretched on until it was almost unbearable, and then –

"I have wandered here for so many years. I was born in the darkness, my mother was born in the darkness, and her mother before her. But that is long ago," she waved her hand contemptuously, "and I have taken many forms since then. Where do you hail from, stranger?"

Ron began screwing up his eyebrows and pointing his wand at himself.

"Um," Ozland began, instantly hating himself, "um –"

"Ah, a traveller from the city of Um. I had thought it to be long gone, even in my time, but evidently Um has risen once more, as it was foretold by Prachit the Terrible –"

Ron doubled over, gasping. "This is Luna Lovegood and she's in the year below us and she does this _all the time_ and _you can't just pretend to be insane whenever Flitwick tries to give you detention the only place where that works is Muggle television_ –"

"Um," said Ozland, astutely.

"– and _why_ did you _silence_ me?"

"Because," Luna remarked, "I knew you'd ruin my sketch."

"– and _how_ didn't we see you?"

"Something something Nargles."

" _What?_ "

"Ignore him," she said to Ozland, gesturing at Ron, who was rubbing his head. "I'm Professor Lovegood, senior Transfiguration lecturer at Hogwarts and undercover Auror at the DMLE's Bad Things Division. I adopted this youthful form earlier this year to get on the inside of a daffodil-smuggling ring – daffodils are legal, but we have a strict no-ring policy at Hogwarts."

"I'm Ozland Cunningham, Mars-Minister of General Affairs of the New Zealand branch of the Celestian Unorthodox Church," said Ozland automatically. _God I'm so confused._

Ron spluttered. "Luna is fourteen or something and I've seen her do this bit three times before. Also, Ozland, _what?_ "

The girl in the quilt tapped her cheek. "I think I might've seen your name somewhere in the Muggle newspapers my dad reads."

...

"Ah, that's it."

"What's it?"

"Exposition. And this late in the story too, how lazy."

"Er," said Ron, "you know we can't see exposition, right, Luna?"

"This is getting too meta for me," muttered Ozland.

"Oh, no," said Luna, breaking into an unusually deep belly-laugh, "this is just my 'pretending we're all in a book' gimmick."

Ozland clasped the side of his head, suddenly overcome by a nauseating wave of unreality. "Look, Ron – let's just pull the telescopes out of the wall and get going. Luna, whatever you were doing . . . what _were_ you doing?"

"Mhm," hummed Luna, completely ignoring the question, "well, you'd want the second and third ones then."

"Come on," said Ron, also clasping the side of his head and looking upwards at the ceiling for no discernible reason, "tell us what all of them do. There's a good gag here, I can _sense_ it."

"I don't think the universe works like that, Ron," said Ozland.

"Well," replied Luna, "the first one shows you the back of your head."

Ron nodded. "Uh-huh."

"Does Luna always make things this weird?"

"The second one shows you the world from five minutes ago."

Ron nodded with more vigour. "Yup, keep going."

"How does she know any of this, anyway? I think she's just making it up."

"The third one shows you what the world would look like if telescopes hadn't been invented, but it's pretty pointless because it's pointing at Sagittarius right now."

"Oh."

"Okay, great! Now that we've wrapped everything up –"

"Oh, and the fourth one sucks you up and puts you on Venus."

 **#######**

It was five o'clock, and Ozland had been awake for twenty-five hours. The twins had bought him a lemonade-flavoured Wakefulness Potion in a crystal vial, which he'd gulped down with wild abandon. The feeling was identical to agrypnomorphine – a dirty, giddy, paranoid buzz. The thought occurred to him: what if agrypnomorphine _was_ Wakefulness Potion? Wakefulness Potion, perhaps adulterated with some other stimulant, manufactured in magical Britain, sold onto the Triad, and concentrated into the powder that businessmen sprinkled onto their coffees and rubbed into their gums?

The sights and sounds around him, dulled by sleep deprivation, became jabbing pains.

He became painfully aware of his own powerlessness.

Ginny was a year younger than him, but knew three years worth of spells.

Ron seemed friendly, if not slightly insecure, but when they'd gone for lunch at Florean Fortescue's, he'd played Ozland for ten one-minute quick games of chess, always starting with the Bongcloud Attack, and had swiftly won each game.

The twins had a Secret Box, a flying carpet, Time Turners and God knew what else, were coming into their Seventh Year, and had invented at least five original Charms.

Mrs Weasley seemed familiar with ritual theory, had three decades of post-Hogwarts experience in magic, and had fought in a war.

Every person passing by, perhaps with the exception of small children, could easily kill him – and the only thing keeping him safe was that, at the moment, nobody had a sufficiently good reason to.

"Come on now, it doesn't take that long."

"Mum, he's on Wakefulness Potion," said Ginny. "And besides, he doesn't have a Ministry-issued floppy disk yet, so he can't do it anyway."

They were on Side-Alley 5K. Or were they? Ozland saw the sign a few minutes ago, but he could easily have been False Memory-Charmed. All he knew was that people who looked like Mrs Weasley, Ginny, and him were standing outside a series of what he assumed were golden fridges, or telephone booths. Was he even him?

"And?"

" _And_ he's obviously in a paranoia loop. Just look at his eyes."

"Oh dear, he is, isn't he? _Disconfundo_."

Ozland suddenly lost track of what he was thinking about.

"Ozland?" Mrs Weasley said softly.

"Yes?" There was something he was thinking about but he wasn't thinking about it anymore. What had he been thinking about? Think, think, think. He could see the shape of the thought, like a wrapped gift, but he couldn't untie the bow.

"This is a Rejuvenation Booth."

"What?"

"This is a Rejuvenation Booth," Mrs Weasley patiently repeated. "You're going to have to learn how to use one of these, so pay attention. Wand out."

Ozland dug through his pockets for his wand, while Mrs Weasley looked on, disapprovingly. He was struck by the oddity of the scene. The sky now had a purplish tint and the second red moon had the malevolent radiance of a stop-light. The clouds were even odder than when he'd first jumped out of a puddle and into Diagon Alley: spinning triangles, like hookah-rings blown by a god trying to show off. The buildings around them were much posher, with jutting decks and silver rails, but were still intimidating in the same way that forests with tall trees were.

"We'll have to get you a proper holster, too. Now, listen closely. It's very simple. First, do a rotated sigma-swish – by that I mean trace the letter 'M' – then draw a small circle."

He traced out the motions. The sequence felt oddly natural.

"Now, you don't have to do this part." She swished her wand about. " _Epísimo aítima pros to Ypourgeío_. I, Molly Weasley, request the use of twenty kilothaums for the purpose of a standard rejuvenation ritual to be conducted within Booth Number 1092."

"REQUEST APPROVED," boomed a voice from no particular direction. "THREE KNUTS HAS BEEN CHARGED TO YOUR ACCOUNT."

Mrs Weasley grasped at the air and pulled, until a fragment of a line, thinner than a hair, but thicker than spider silk, appeared between her thumb and index finger. She went around to the side of the booth, where a copper rod jutted out from its scratched surface, and wound the thread around the rod.

The front of the booth opened with a click, revealing a slot, into which Mrs Weasley placed a 3½ inch floppy-disk labelled 'MW, subt-aged, 20s' in neat cursive. Inside the booth, on the ground, was the chalk outline of a circle. She then brought out a needle and pricked her thumb, allowing a drop of blood to spill into the centre, walking into the circle. The door closed.

There was a murmuring of words, a kettle-like squeal, and a loud bang.

Ginny leant against a pole, staring disinterestedly up at the sky.

Mrs Weasley stepped out, looking subtly older. Her eyes were more crinkled, her posture sharper, and there were streaks of gray in her imperceptibly-thinner hair. In his heightened state of awareness, Ozland noticed she was wearing a plain silver wristband, and remembered that Professor McGonagall had been wearing one too – Dumbledore's had been gold. (The thought occurred to him that in a society where everyone looked to be in their mid-20s, status symbols would become necessary.)

"Class of 1966 Gryffindor gala," she said, as if that explained anything. "Have you thought about what House you'll be in?"

"House? Um, not really."

She opened her mouth, as if she was about to say something, when a raven Patronus appeared, perching on top of the booth.

A high-pitched voice rang out from its beak: "Molly, where are you? Albus wants the boy at Hogwarts!"

"Side-Alley 5K, near the booths," Mrs Weasley enunciated crisply. "Professor Flitwick, he teaches Charms and Ritual Theory," she added, after the raven had flown off. "In any case, you should consider Gryffindor. It's the House we were Sorted into, along with Minerva, Chief Warlock Dumbledore – and most of the Light side of the War."

Ozland's head spun with all of the implied capital letters. "Why not the others?"

Ginny, who had been quiet up until that point, piped up. "Slytherins are slimy aristocrats, Hufflepuffs are losers, and Ravenclaws are goody-goody book–"

Mrs Weasley shot Ginny a disapproving look.

A tiny man in green robes whirled into existence on the cobblestones a few feet from them. He slipped on a puddle, almost falling flat on his back before he somehow managed to right himself. "Ah," he squeaked brightly, "Molly, Ginny . . . and you must be Ozland Dwimmersmith, yes?"

"Yes," said Ozland, stiffly, unsure as to what else he should say.

"Then I'm afraid you will have to bid the lovely Weasleys adieu and bring your no-doubt exciting shopping excursion to a close – the Headmaster requests your presence in his office to discuss your lodging situation," the tiny man frowned, "and a few other things, I would imagine."

Ozland shook Mrs Weasley's hand, and after some heavy-handed prompting, Ginny shook his hand too, seeming delighted to almost squeeze it into a pulp. "Thank you," Ozland said with as much genuineness as he could muster, "and I'm not saying that as a nicety either. Today has been – well, I checked to make sure I wasn't dreaming nine times today, that should give you an idea. And I'm still confused about a lot of things, including how your economy works and what the whole dimensional pocket business is about – but all of you are such wonderful people and I don't think there could've been a better family in wizarding Britain to reacquaint me with this world, and I hope one day I can discharge my enormous debt to all of you. Please give Ron and the twins my regards – and as soon as I find out how thermoses work, I'll send a letter to Mr Weasley. Also keep the chocolate safe."

Professor Flitwick took out a checkered handkerchief twice the width of his face, dabbed his eyes, and sneezed into it, very emotionally. "Truly, truly heartwarming. And dear me, would you look at the time – we have about fifteen minutes until you're expected to meet with the Headmaster – we'd better Apparate." He held out his arm. "Irish jig position, please, Ozland."

After a few more goodbyes, they hooked their arms together.

"Three, two, one."

The streets around him vanished and everything went dark and cramped. Ozland remembered Professor McGonagall had said that Apparition felt like being forced through a curly drinking-straw – it turned out to be a very accurate description.

They landed inside a treehouse, spinning on the spot.

He looked around. "How many students does Hogwarts _have_?"

Flitwick opened the door to the treehouse, revealing a long cable to which a little wooden carriage was attached, a cable that descended from the treetops to a castle obscured by a light mist in the distance. "Hogwarts proper is warded against Apparition – this is an outpost." He opened a second, creaky door which lead into the carriage and hopped inside, seating himself on a patterned stool. "Oh, don't be alarmed – it's Charmed for balance and flawless function," he said, at Ozland's reluctance.

Ozland clambered his way in, tripping on an uneven bit of carpet before finding himself a stool to sit on.

The little man flicked his wand, and the carriage lurched. Looking out the window, he could have sworn the trees were _bending_ out of the way to accommodate its breakneck speed.

"So," said Flitwick conversationally, "had a hectic day, did you?"

"To say the least."

They sat in silence, the professor tapping his knee with frenetic regularity. Despite his jovial disposition, Ozland had the sense that something was making him uneasy.

Flitwick cleared his throat. "Have you thought about what House you'll be in?"

Ozland wondered, not for the first time, whether he had any choice in the matter. From what he'd heard, whatever sorting mechanism Hogwarts was using, it was based around literary archetypes and high-school sitcom clichés, rather than anything sensible. Would it be a hundred-question personality test? Some sort of trial by fire? A mind-reading device? Clearly personal preferences had some effect on the sorting process, otherwise nobody would be attempting to sway him to their way of thinking.

"Er, no."

The Charms Professor seemed to take this as his cue. "Now, I know the Weasleys have probably already sold you on Gryffindor, but," he held up a finger, "Ravenclaw is really where you'll want to be if your temperament is more quiet and studious – we're one of the best-performing Houses academically, and we have _very_ active study and support groups managed by our helpful Prefects – which could be a boon in your case, since you'll be catching up with four years of coursework – and I have to say, our common room has a simply _breathtaking_ vista in addition to our own library –"

"Anything wrong with the other Houses?" Ozland asked.

"– ah, there's nothing _wrong_ with the other Houses _per se_ ," Flitwick said, slightly thrown by the sudden interjection – and then, as if considering the question more deeply, he went on. "In Gryffindor, it's almost inevitable you'll become caught up in some wild shenanigans, docked points for something you weren't responsible for – if you're with the wrong people at the wrong time – and Gryffindors . . . tend to be, ah, _headstrong_ , very prone to quick judgement rather than rigorous analysis – make of that what you will," he paused, grimacing, " _Slytherin_ . . . I would recommend strongly against Slytherin." He seemed pained. "If you _are_ Sorted into Slytherin, I would urge you to file an appeal with the Headmaster."

"Why?"

"You haven't been to wizarding Britain in a number of years, is that right?"

"The last time I was here, I was a toddler."

"Mhm," hummed Professor Flitwick, "there is a cultural jump from Muggle to wizarding society, I'm told. But the jump from Muggle to Slytherin society is much greater. Hierarchies, alliances, codes, conspiracies, historical feuds between families, deference, blood _purity_ ," he looked particularly disgusted at the word, "Slytherin children are accustomed to all of those things. A wrong word at the House table could have you shunned for the remainder of your years at Hogwarts – very unpleasant, unfortunately I have been witness to the phenomenon a number of times. And, naturally, the Slytherins will assume that you will be a Muggleborn, from whom they demand submissiveness. A momentary lack of civility will be treated as the upending of a natural order, and Slytherins do not take to threats, however slight, to their aristocratic privilege very kindly."

 _That sounds fairly interesting, actually_. "And Hufflepuff?"

Professor Flitwick lightly coughed. "Slytherin is known for its cunning, Ravenclaw for its wit, Gryffindor for its bravery. Hufflepuff is known as the House to which students who possess none of those virtues are Sorted. Although, in all respects, Hufflepuff is a very pleasant, very lovely House to be in, I'm told," he added, unconvincingly.

 _What is_ up _with these people and constantly shitting on Hufflepuff_? "Ravenclaw _does_ sound very appealing."

"Good to hear," Flitwick replied, although he still seemed tense. There was a long lull, in which nothing but the swishing of the trees around them could be heard. The castle loomed larger, and Ozland was able to see parapets and gargoyles and towers jutting out of a medieval edifice. Coming out of a particular tower in the castle was a fork of what looked like frozen lightning. It looked almost like a wound in the air.

"What's that?" Ozland said, pointing.

"What?"

Ozland pointed more accurately.

"Oh, that."

"Yes, that."

"That's nothing to worry about."

"I'm sure, but I'd like to know what it is, if it isn't any trouble."

"It's, ah, an aurora borealis. We get them in Hogwarts, sometimes."

"During the daytime?"

"Yes."

" _Just_ near one of the castle's towers?"

"Yes. They can be highly localised."

"Huh."

"It's none of my business, really," Flitwick said, after some time had passed, his eyes flitting back and forth from one window to another, "but would it be alright if I asked you what area your accidental magic ended up specialising in? It's purely out of personal interest."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, Penelope Clearwater – she graduated last year – can Silence the area around her. Althea Golledge can tell how long any given thing would take or last – she's in the Department of Mysteries, now, works in project management – although, chronomantic abilities are rather rare. It's fairly common with Muggleborns, or in your case, wizardborns who grew up in Muggle society – it usually develops in children after the age of eleven unless they go to Hogwarts, which acts as a magical outlet I suppose you could say."

"I didn't _specialise_ in anything. Unless there's a common theme to levitating pencils and turning water into orange juice –"

The carriage jolted, passing through an open window in the castle, and screeching as it flew through rows of corridors lined with knights and paintings.

"– is this safe?"

"I enchanted it myself," Flitwick said, sounding slightly hurt.

Ozland looked through the front window.

"There isn't any cable in front of us."

"It makes new cable once it runs out," the professor replied, as if that was anywhere near a reassuring explanation.

The carriage stopped outside an enormous, ugly stone griffin, guarding a spiral staircase.

"The staircase stopped working since the man from the Office of Impossibility said it was impossible, so just walk right on up," Flitwick said, tipping his pointed hat. "Cheerio, Ozland – good talking to you."

Ozland waved half-heartedly and paused in front of the gargoyle. After pacing back and forth in front of it, he realised he might as well try, since Flitwick's carriage had zoomed down the halls and nobody else was around. "I'm here to see Dumbledore," he said finally.

The griffin shuffled aside. Ozland began walking up the staircase, stopping at a towering door that visibly glistened and crackled with magic.

A painting of a pompous-looking, tiny-nosed man was fixed to the front. "Here to see Dumbledore?" it asked.

Ozland froze. "Are you . . . _conscious_?"

"No, I just have an infinite book tucked under my arm that tells me what to say given arbitrary input sentences from random strangers who come up to Dumbledore's door. Of course I'm conscious, you twat. Now, are you here to see Dumbledore or not?"

"I'm at Dumbledore's door, what do you think?"

"What do _I_ think?" scoffed the painting, clearly affronted. "What do I _think_? Clearly nothing, since my _pitiful, illegitimate_ _consciousness_ is smeared across a three-hundred-year-old canvas and mixed with egg whites. Go in, you bigoted clod – it's open."

Ozland's first reaction was to threaten to pour acid onto it while it was sleeping (that is, if paintings even slept), but it occurred to him that it would be unwise to say this aloud, no less in front of the door to the Headmaster of the school he would be attending –

 _Will I, though?_

To do anything else seemed to run against the logic of the universe. He'd gotten a strange letter from a secret society of wizards inviting him to attend a secret magic school, found out who his real parents were, gone shopping for his supplies . . . saying 'no' after all of that and returning back to his life just didn't seem like an option.

 _Of course it's an option. Why wouldn't it be an option? Am I going to be ranking available options by narrative convenience now?_

It was an option, of course – a narratively-inconvenient option, perhaps, but an option nonetheless. But would he be _allowed_ to choose it? Professor McGonagall had mentioned Memory Charms, the twins had talked at length about magical contracts, Ron had discussed the Imperius – the wizarding world seemed to explode with ways that a much more powerful, senior wizard could mess with his mind in unforeseen ways. And there had been _something_ about a prophecy . . .

George had warned him against going up against Time except on Sundays, and although he'd probably been joking, it was still good advice.

The truth was, he felt a very deep _something_ to the Celestian Unorthodox Church, and that something was like a fish-hook buried deep in his gut, except in a less painful way.

Although, that considered, in the end, hitting the big red nuclear button and ditching the Church for Hogwarts would probably be better for his long-term mental health.

"Internal monologue, eh?" said the painting, still looking rather malicious.

"Yeah."

"Naturally, _I_ don't experience internal monologue, or for that matter, _any_ qualia because _I'm_ just a good-for-nothing p-zombie, post-Classical slab of shi–"

Ozland knocked politely and pushed open the door, which gave way with surprising ease.

Dumbledore's office was what you'd expect of eight centuries of continuous habitation by eccentric old men – and lately, one _very_ eccentric, _very_ old man. The wallpaper was a faded indigo, but it had been unevenly wallpapered over with three other layers of wallpaper and then suffocated by hundreds of paintings of headmasters, most snoring, some talking silently to one another, a few making rude gestures at him. Tables from various eras had made the room their permanent residence, and housed an assortment of _things_ – pointless, intricate little machines that made pointless, intricate sounds. Vellum-bound books cascaded from questionably-stable shelves. There were three doors in the room, one wedged beneath two paintings of pipes, one on the the roof, and one that Ozland's brain _insisted_ was _definitely_ in the room, but, as far as he could see, wasn't anywhere.

At the centre of the chaos was Dumbledore, who was smiling wanly at him with his half-moon glasses, ridiculous beard, and light purple robes – sitting at his desk, on top of which there was an open book with a gun-shaped hole cut into its pages, except the hole was pitch-black, and there was a little stepladder descending into it.

"Ah, Ozland! Don't mind Rudolfus – he's weary of his dreadfully-prolonged, meaningless existence and only attempting to incite students to commit acts of violence against his person in an attempt to break up the tedium. But let it be known, he's very fun once the Butterbeer begins to flow."

"Wouldn't it be more ethical to, you know, end his existence, then?"

"Unfortunately assisted painting-suicide is still outlawed by Ministry decree unless consent is given – otherwise it would be considered murder," said Dumbledore, gravely.

"So if he consents to – "

"The Ministry considers paintings to be non-conscious simulacra, incapable of giving meaningful consent." He threw up his hands. "The world is a mad, mad place, Ozland. But I digress – it is too common an affliction among us youthful old men to stride off the beaten conversational path and into the forests of the night – would you care to take a seat? Ah, the red chesterfield, an excellent choice."

Ozland couldn't help but stare at the book-hole. "Professor Flitwick said something about lodging arrangements?"

"Indeed. Professor Mogpipe who teaches Eighth Year Magical Maintenance, was walking down the third floor corridor not so long ago, considering the issue of your far-awayness from Britain having been prompted by myself, and by fortunate happenstance, found a room which should accommodate you for the five days up to the beginning of the school term." The indecision must have been plain on his face, for Dumbledore frowned. "You have obligations at home. How utterly inconsiderate of me to make such an imposition."

Ozland rubbed his eyes. "No, it's fine. When I first, you know, grasped the whole _scope_ of what was going on, how isolated everything was – I mean, it's literally the other side of the world, I couldn't be further away from New Zealand – I thought I could just, well, I'm not sure, maybe I could rent an apartment or bunk up in one of the Weasleys' spare rooms. I could learn magic at Hogwarts and just have nothing I needed to do." He yawned. The Wakefulness-whatever-it-was was wearing off, apparently. "That sounded really great at first, but then, well, what would I be doing it for? What would I be going to Hogwarts _for?_ "

"To make new friends and devote yourself to the study of the arcane arts?"

He paused. "Well, actually those would be some good reasons to go to Hogwarts. But people need me back home and I can't just disappear one night and never see them again. Besides the fact that it would start a civil war and probably end in a nuclear exchange covering Australasia. But it would still be hard," he waved his hands about helplessly, "knowing all of this exists."

Dumbledore leaned forward. "Perhaps I can make the decision easier for you."

"Go on."

"If you do not attend Hogwarts, you will explode."

Nothing was said for a few seconds and then –

"Literally?"

Dumbledore tilted his glasses. "Literally."

" _How? Why?_ "

"Ozland," the ancient, yet 20s-something-looking wizard boomed, "every time you become truly – and I mean _truly_ – angry, you roll the dice, so to speak. Your magic is untamed, uncontrolled, uncontroll _able_ – unless you receive a formal education, taxing your brains, straining your magic, and draining out your emotions on a regular basis. Have you heard of spontaneous combustion?"

"Yes."

"Need I say more?"

" _Shit_. Uh, sorry."

"No need to apologise, Ozland," Dumbledore said, "we _are_ all powerful wizards and we _are_ all under fifty-six privacy Charms, so feel free to cuss like a drunken sailor."

" . . . that whole exploding thing _really, really_ did not make it easier to decide, just so you know."

"That should present no issue," said Dumbledore, unsheathing his wand. "Because, of course –"

HE'S GOING TO MEMORY-CHARM YOU, screamed a voice in his head.

Ozland jumped out of the chair, his eyes wide.

" – we can simply cast the Ritual of the Cubic Day. Ozland?" Dumbledore looked puzzled.

He sat back down again, thoroughly ashamed. "I thought you were going to Memory Charm me, or force me into a magical contract, or something."

"Oh," said Dumbledore, looking disappointed, "you have read Skeeter's account of the War, then?"

"What?"

Dumbledore flicked his wand, and a book whipped out from the shelf and into his hand. "Rita Skeeter wrote this . . . dramatised account of the War. Most of it was received in poor taste, but I'm told it leaves the reader with an impression of me as a manipulative, condescending, doddering old man who has a rather derivative fondness for Memory Charms."

"I haven't read it. Why don't you just have her killed if it's such an issue?"

"Come again?"

"Or frame her for something and get her locked up."

The Chief Warlock seemed disturbed by the idea. "Is that standard political practice in New Zealand?"

That there was any other form of political practice for dissidents hadn't occurred to him. "Ye-es."

"Ozland," Dumbledore drummed his fingers on the wooden surface of the table, "I am not the kind to so lightly commit an act as vile as murder, nor to condemn a woman, innocent of all crimes, but the non-crime of offending the critical sensibilities of a powerful man, to the Dementors of Azkaban. But that aside, were Lucius to, on hearing the news of Rita Skeeter's demise, realise that the informal rules of proper conduct had been fundamentally altered – that every journalist who penned an unflattering article, every writer with an inflammatory passage, every author whose depiction of his character was to him unbecoming, was game – would he not respond in kind with the means at his disposal, extenuating the bloodshed beyond my original intentions, were they murderous? Or perhaps, it is the press that you ought to imagine – one of their own kind locked away, a woman who knew no boundaries when it came to levying criticism at the wealthy and ennobled, to airing secrets, whether real or imagined, to the British public? Would they hesitate for a second longer before unveiling corruption and bringing the guilty, those untouchable by the courts, to justice? Would they, in their minds contemplating the Dementors, shelve criticism and put a halt to affronting the well-connected?"

"Good point," Ozland conceded. _If he came up with that on the spot, that was impressive_. "Um, I think we've wandered off-topic."

Dumbledore brought out a notebook and flipped through it. "I make sure to dispense at least three pieces of wisdom with every conversation. Ah, yes. The Ritual of the Cubic Day will, in the words of its inventor, split your mind-essence across the two faces of the Time Cube, allowing you to experience two days for each day that passes in two different countries. It is very rarely conducted."

"Because it doesn't make any sense?"

"Because the ritual is rather messily structured and my colleagues in the Cyprian Institute believe that it could be simplified along Modernist lines. Eugenray was a devout adherent to the Multimodalist school of ritual theory, which has since come out of fashion."

"Wouldn't it also create . . . internal consistency issues?" asked Ozland, skeptically. "You know, all of the usual guff with time travel. Say I wake up in New Zealand, hear on the news a bomb went off in the Underground, go to sleep, wake up in Britain which is, what, twelve hours behind – you know what I mean?"

Dumbledore nodded. "Internal consistency issues, as a general principle, can be avoided by minimising forward-backward information flow, as the chronomancers call it. Hogwarts, I would think, would be sufficiently informationally-insulated from New Zealand, hence why the ritual came to mind."

"So what's the catch?"

"A sleepless night would be a paradox, which could only be resolved through your death. However, that possibility can be prevented through familiarity with sleeping Charms, or with a specialised device, which, should you choose to perform the ritual, Professor Snape will obtain for you. The ritual also demands the fingernail from the thumb of your left-hand."

"That's it?"

"Indeed."

"Okay, let's do this."

"Excellent. First, we will have to find our way to the International Date Line over the Pacific Ocean."

"Great, what _wacky_ mode of transportation are we going to use _this_ – "

Dumbledore snapped his fingers, and they were suddenly hovering over the ocean under a night sky.

Ozland panicked, seeing the waves crashing beneath him. He tapped his foot, feeling an invisible surface below him that kept him from falling into the water. Wind rushed through his hair. "I'll be able to do that finger-snapping teleportation thing one day, right?"

Dumbledore laughed loudly, seeming to find his question uproariously funny, before becoming serious. "The Ritual of the Cubic Day," he said, "transports your mind-essence to your golem body in the instant following its completion – in your case, to New Zealand a few hours _from_ now – so before we begin, there are things you must know sooner than later."

"I'm listening."

"The agenda for tomorrow. Or, from your perspective, yesterday. First, Professor Trelawney will assess your career options. Second, there will be the customary meeting with the other new non-First-Year students. That is all."

"Okay, noted."

"Now, this ritual is very clever, is filled with subtle references to many different works of fiction, contains three koans in Pig Latin, and is also a palindrome, so it would be advisable for you to listen very carefully to appreciate it fully."

 **#######**

 _Luna's exposition_

 _London Evening Herald_

"WORST GANG VIOLENCE IN TWENTY YEARS":

DEATH-COUNT IN NEW ZEALAND "HOLY WAR" REACHES 1,380

[...] called a "blessed child" by the self-declared St. Matchwell, Cunningham was not available to comment [...]

 _The Observatory_

OPINION: INTERVENTION IS NEEDED IN NZ

[...] the New Zealand branch of the Celestian Unorthodox Church has been described variously as a cult, a government, a gang, a criminal syndicate, a political party, and a private militia [...] supported by a patchwork alliance – Tip Top Ice Cream Ltd., Four Star Hotels, and the Nisango – and, our source says, is largely controlled by Rushabh (Jupiter-Minister of the New Zealand branch of the C.U.C), a warlord who threatened to detonate a nuclear device to ascend to power, Ozland Cunningham (Mars-Minister of General Affairs), an unknown who entered the upper echelons of the C.U.C after the 1991 Holy War, Evelyn Rawter (Mars-Minister of Propaganda and Public Relations), the daughter of St. Matchwell who is in formal command of the New Zealand branch of the C.U.C, and Donovan Yu (Mars-Minister of Justice & Defense), the alienated son of Four Star Hotels' CEO and the commander of FSH's militia in the region.

 **#######**

26 AUGUST – INCORPORATED TERRITORY OF THE CELESTIAN UNORTHODOX CHURCH, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

Ozland woke up on his couch to someone banging on the door. _And he woke up, and it was all a dream_ , he thought. _And wow, that was an amazingly cleverly-written ritual_.

The banging persisted, rattling windows.

"Jesus, I'm coming!" he shouted.

He reached the door in a record five seconds and swung it wide open.

It was Evelyn, standing there with the bright blue dress and flowery hat she used for formal occasions. Ozland thought it made her look like a visiting royal, which was probably the intended effect. "Where the _fuck_ have you been and why haven't you responded my – _wow_ , you look awful."

"Well I'm _sorry_ , Ev, but having one of my best mates suddenly suicide on me made me want a night to myself with a couple of beers," he said, feeling immensely guilty at the lie.

"Well _I'm_ sorry, Oz, since I've been trying to fucking reach you for the last five hours to tell you someone leaked Rushabh's suicide to the press before we could set up the official story and that, in accordance with time-honoured tradition, his fucking _Unsealing Ceremony_ , you know, the one where they read out his successor for the position of _Jupiter-Minister of the whole of New Zealand_ , is happening in Gordon Coates in twenty minutes and we're on the fucking guest-list."

"Oh," said Ozland.

"Yes," said Evelyn. "I thought you might say something like that."

 **#######**

19 HAMPSTEAD ROAD, HAMPSTEAD GARDEN SUBURB, HEATHGATE, LONDON – OCTOBER 2, 1991 – ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO

 _One thousand soldiers face an advancing mob, resolute._

 _A bottle spirals, turns three times, and shatters._

 _In a second, gunfire fills the air._

 _Blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a –_

Hermione had faked a cold. She'd never done it before, so she'd gotten away with it. She was a pattern, and her parents were patterns, and they had a pattern inside them that told them how her pattern was supposed to go, and she had broken the pattern, so she'd gotten away with it. Jessica had come down with a cold, and Hermione remembered the cold-pattern, so when she woke up that morning she reproduced the cold-pattern and her parents reproduced the worried-parent-pattern and checked her temperature and said they would call the doctor and made her a mug of cocoa and told her to lie down, all according to the worried-parent-pattern. By nine o'clock, her parents were gone according to their schedule-pattern, and she began thinking.

She began thinking about Negaloth's pattern, and how she could disrupt it. She began thinking about tall skyscrapers and the economy and people in business-suits running to and fro and –

 _This isn't healthy_ , said a little voice in her head.

She responded to that little voice, saying that health was just a pattern but she was different because she controlled her own pattern. Not many people controlled their own patterns and when they did, they were considered unhealthy by normal-patterned people – so there.

May 7 was a pattern. May 7 was a recurring calendar date, and May 7 was a recurring memory. She kept remembering May 7 and remembering it again, but now she controlled her own pattern, so she didn't have to remember it.

She was reading 'The Depression and the Rise of the All-American Oligarchy' when there came a knock on the door. The postman was there, and the postman had a package. The package was for her. She opened up the package with scissor-blades, and inside the package were hundreds of black cassette tapes, all numbered.

Now this was a mystery.

She went up to her room, and put the first cassette into her cassette-player, and put the cassette-player on her nightstand, and listened. At first, there was an anti-hiss of silence, and then there was a low voice. "Hermione," it said, without inflection, so soft, so neutral that it verged on sinister. "Please, listen very closely."

Her palms began to sweat. She had the sudden, nauseating feeling that everything up until that moment had been a mechanical dream. She'd reduced her world to patterns, and forgotten that it was real.

"I am going to talk to you, and you can talk back to me, because I know what you will say. When I say 'end recording', you need to press the stop button. If I tell you not to play the tape for a certain period of time – a day, a week, a month – that's what you need to do. You can only talk after I say 'end recording'. End recording."

She obediently reached forward, pushing the stop button. "Who are you?" she asked aloud, suddenly feeling very vulnerable.

Play. "I'll give you a clue. You watched part of a documentary on me on the BBC yesterday. End recording." Stop.

She rolled a pair of dice on her nightstand. "What did I just do?"

Play. "You tried to test the outer limits of my predictive capabilities by rolling a pair of dice. Two and six. But enough of this, you must know who I am now. Any questions? End recording." Stop.

Hermione bit her lip. "What do you want, Bolshoy?"

Play. "Melodramatic, but pointed," went the voice, as if it were commenting on a half-decent TV drama. "Every thought leaves a subtle dent on the world, Hermione – every significant choice, every unspoken word. I can tell you what Anita was thinking, as the bullets passed through her body. I can tell you what emotions flashed through her brain as she bled to death on the stones of Trafalgar Square. Pain, of course – long, long, pain. But as her lungs exhaled for the last time, a dent was made in the world – the dent of a powerful thought. The powerful thought was her realisation, in her dying moments, that Hermione, her closest friend, had seen her, and that Hermione would avenge her. The future is not certain – even the brightest outlines are blurred, but I know enough to tell you this, Hermione: your vengeance is justified, and moreover, it is _right_."

The voice slowed. "If you give me the opportunity to help you, I will. I will not take over your project, as it were – it is yours, and yours alone. I can offer you guidance – moral or scientific – connections from Britain and beyond, and resources in abundance. Evidently I have planned in advance, hence the additional cassette tapes. I want you to think today about my offer, and remember this: Negaloth has sacrificed millions at the altar of the temple of profit. To those millions suffering at its leisure, a strike against Negaloth would be a sign that there is justice in the universe, and that they can wield it. There are very few people in Britain who can do what you _could_ do, Hermione, and they are fewer by the day. End recording."

Stop.

"I'd have to be a real dunce not to accept your help, wouldn't I? Count me in."

Play. "Excellent. Now, listen very, very closely."

 **#######**


	6. Ch6 – A Painting Inside A Painting

**A/N: It's been almost two months since I published the last chapter. Life caught up and I realised my schedule of one chapter every two weeks was much too ambitious. I took some time off to plan out the rest of the story.**

 **To recap, Ozland has just been in Dumbledore's office after bidding the Weasleys adieu, undergone the very-cleverly-written Ritual of the Time Cube, and woken up back in New Zealand.**

 **#######**  
CHAPTER SIX  
 **#######**

[...]

STALIN:

I cannot abide by your superstition.

WIZARD:

Then I must repeat to you once more, our craft is ineffable,

And moreover not intended to be understood by man.

STALIN:

All is within the grasp of man! I have confidence that

In time man shall puncture the very firmament of the heavens

And violate the kingdom of God Himself.

WIZARD:

Such ambitions have been shared by cities whose names

Now read on tombstones.

STALIN:

Yet we are not a city, we are a civilisation.

WIZARD:

And as a city is to a civilisation, so will be past catastrophes

To the catastrophe that will inevitably result!

STALIN:

This magic, it resists scientific experimentation so?

WIZARD:

Tell me of what you mean by that term

Which rings so strangely to my ears.

STALIN:

It is to find within the turmoil of the universe

An underlying order; to lay bare the structure of

The celestial storm that surrounds us. It is

To find Newton in the path of Neptune,

Darwin in the Galapagos, and Marx in market capitalism.

It is to discern the nature of the cosmos and its atoms,

The arrangement of matter which gives rise to higher forms.

WIZARD:

I am afraid, dear General Secretary, that you shall find

That there is no underlying order to be found. That the

Inscrutability of wizardry will bring you to new heights

Of madness and frustration, as it has done to many before you.

Many have, of course, discovered arcane principles which

May be applied by practitioners of the craft, but I think

That you shall find that the low-hanging fruit have already

Been plucked, and that, in attempting to reach higher,

You may have an accident with your ladder and hurt yourself.

STALIN:

Then it is not only gold you ask for, but the suspension

Of our innate curiosity? A heavy price indeed.

WIZARD:

To sate one's curiosity before the well-beings of one's countrymen

Is perhaps a selfish and treacherous venture.

STALIN:

It is for _their_ sakes that I wonder, not out of any selfish vice.

WIZARD:

Wonder?

STALIN:

The basis of our socialist system is the perfection

Of industrial techniques. To fully understand the principles

Which underlie the steam engine and the spinning loom

Is an important thing indeed. Without an understanding,

How can we perfect? Bereft of understanding, we would be

Condemned to see ourselves stagnate and stumble.

We cannot build communism through stumbling, hence

My concern over the implications of this supernatural marvel.

But more still, it would undermine the faith of every Soviet citizen

In the certitude of scientific fact, cast doubt on what mankind

Has so-far illuminated. What, say, of the principles

Of electromagnetism given the existence of _Lumos_?

What of the conservation of matter, given the existence of

A simple water-making Charm? Surely you can see how

Such a revelation would dampen the spirit of progress

And open the floodgates of religious reactionism!

WIZARD:

Then I must suggest, if the possibility has not

Already occurred to you, to walk on two feet.

STALIN:

Please elaborate.

WIZARD:

While magic will make every burden lighter by a thousandfold,

Your Muggle sciences will attempt to lighten every burden

Using reason rather than received lore. Eventually,

Should the words you have spoken to me be true,

A transition would begin, in which magic would be supplanted

By superior technological advances.

STALIN:

I must discuss it with Molotov.

[...]

– Belarusian University of the Arts play entitled 'Stalin's Dilemma' (performed 1986, translated by Yazhk [Dogthinker, Class III])

 **#######**

"Imitative and unnecessarily florid. The heavy hand of Gosteleradio and Bolshoy's Dogthinkers have clearly dealt us another propaganda play." – **radioyerevananswers885**

"Angelika Savelievna's performance as Stalin was inspired." – **Martsin Aleksiutovič, steel-worker, associate professor of sociology at the B.U.A**

"[...] an exploration of a collision between dialectical materialism and the seemingly-insurmountable ideological challenge of magic that proved utterly tantalising." – **Critic, Dogthinker [Class V]**

"If this gets adapted into film, I would be happy to consult." – **Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin [** _ **VERIFIED USER**_ **]**

 **#######**

THE SAME DAY – GORDON COATES MEMORIAL PARK, TERRITORY OF THE CELESTIAN UNORTHODOX CHURCH, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

 _"Well I'm sorry, Oz, since I've been trying to fucking reach you for the last five hours to tell you someone leaked Rushabh's suicide to the press before we could set up the official story and that, in accordance with time-honoured tradition, his fucking Unsealing Ceremony, you know, the one where they read out his successor for the position of Jupiter-Minister of the whole of New Zealand, is happening in Gordon Coates in twenty minutes and we're on the fucking guest-list."_

 _"Oh," said Ozland._

 _"Yes," said Evelyn. "I thought you might say something like that."_

Something felt wrong.

The procession was small and formal and held on the flat top of a hill overlooking a garden of flowers. A squat, marbly-coloured box could be found where an open casket would have been.

A man in factory-blue overalls went around, solemnly offering everyone a scoop of black ice-cream in memory of the recently departed, courtesy of Tip Top Ltd. Evelyn didn't know what flavour it would be. She suspected it would either be licorice or charcoal, and so politely declined.

As she and Ozland walked through the concentric semicircles to take their seats, the apprehensive voices became a low, subdued murmur like a pot being taken off a stovetop, going from boiling to simmering. There was a note of tension in the air. The CEO of Tip Top glanced at her, and when she turned to look back at him, he was staring resolutely forward.

As she sat, Ozland began shaking hands with people. He went from Wu Xilai, Commissar of External Affairs of the Red Dragons, to some high-ranking Nisango member to Henry van Nanseer, a mysterious-looking ThauCorp exec, all sitting in the innermost row. His handshake, Evelyn noted, could do with a little more work, but it seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect. The semicircles were divided down the middle by a black carpet, and after Ozland had finished shaking hands with everyone in the innermost row, he ambled down the carpet, briefly touching the nearest chair of each row. The tension began to unravel. The world exhaled. Everything was going to be alright.

(It was par for the course for semi-public gatherings like these, but Evelyn was slightly embarrassed to see a few people in the outermost rows attempt to discreetly touch their fingers to Ozland's cloak, as if divinity brushed off.)

And then he came back, and sat in the seat, and everything was completely silent.

Someone from the middle-row, probably the Mars-Minister of Rituals, rose and brought himself to the centre of the congregation. The Rituals Minister cleared his throat, a small, bleating noise, and began. "I stand before all of you in a special position, both as the executor to Rushabh's Celestian Will, and as," he said, too proudly for Evelyn's taste, "the Mars-Minister of Rituals for the North Shore City Region." He went on, listing trivial, unimportant things, stroking his beard self-importantly.

"So, this is it, isn't it?" It was a question, but Ozland had said it flatly – not that there was much intonative nuance you could put into a whisper.

"Chin up, Oz. You're about to make it big-time."

"Well, Rushabh _might've_ passed the Jupiter-Ministership onto _you_ ," Ozland replied glassily. _That stings._

"Just in case your absinthe-induced nostalgia-fog is preventing you from remembering things properly, he was off his damn nut," she shot back. "He _might've_ passed it onto Kev. Or the Minister of Justice. Or some woman who did his fucking dry-cleaning back in '85."

"He wouldn't've."

"Of course he _would not have_ ," Evelyn made sure to enunciate each of the words individually, "he almost started a second game of nuclear chicken with the Church just to get you your General Affairs Ministership, so was there any _point_ to you saying _I_ might be the next Jupiter-Minister or did you just say that to be a hungover asshole?"

"I didn't mean it that way."

"Then how _did_ you mean it?"

He apparently couldn't think of anything to say to that.

Evelyn sat back, satisfied, while the Minister of Rituals droned onward. She glared at him, tapping her watch suggestively.

The Minister cut off into a strangled silence. "– er, and he did many good things later on in his life, I'm sure. Rushabh came to New Zealand from Indonesia as a nuclear technician and departed our world as a cherished, senior figure in the Church, and other things along those lines, et cetera, et cetera. I wouldn't want to, er, _detain_ such an esteemed congregation for longer than necessary, so I'll get to the Unsealing, shall I?" he laughed nervously.

Everyone brought out their earmuffs during a long, uncomfortable time in which the Rituals Minister took to the box with a gargantuan half-chisel half-hammer. _There_ has _to be a more effective way to seal a Celestian Will, other than putting it in a box._ An intemperate elderly gentleman four seats to her left looked as if he were about to stand up indignantly and leave the Unsealing, but evidently decided it would be too awkward. His moustache jerked about on his face like an angry burlesque dancer.

The woman sitting to her right, the wife of the Chief Financial Officer of the Mongol Private Defense Corporation, slouched, fanning herself. "How long do these usually take?" she asked Evelyn in a loud drawl.

"Depends," Evelyn replied, having already decided that she disliked the woman's attitude, which she had evaluated separately from her being a 77-Church-following God-damned heathen whore bitch gold-digger who would inevitably be vaporized by the Celestians when the End Times came. "It's a hyper-regular metalloid nanocrystalline case from ThauCorp's labs."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Means it doesn't melt or buckle or warp, it shatters. All of the ridges, faults, and stress-lines from the . . . tool," she was on a fucking streak of knowledgeability and if she didn't know what the half-hammer half-chisel thing was called, it was its own fault for being so damn obscure, "nothing happens for a while, maybe a minute, two, five, ten, twenty – and then suddenly it bursts into little pieces like glass."

Madam Mignani had smoothly transitioned from obliviously gazing at the box to watching it in terror, jerking involuntarily with every hammer-chisel blow.

"There are some extra seats near the back," said Evelyn kindly. "And everyone's already seen you sitting in the front so it won't be a status blow or anything if you're worried about that."

She huffed. It was a remarkably articulate huff. It was a huff that declared 'I'm so high status I don't even have to worry about status'. The heathen-woman picked up her handbag and left soon after.

Evelyn smiled.

That was when the box shattered.

 **##**

"So, it's the big day, huh?" Henry van Nanseer was almost jubilant as they shook hands.

"No idea what you mean," Ozland said, crisply.

The exec snorted. "The demented old fuck is dead, and we all know he favoured you as his successor. Drop the faux obliviousness."

"I'll thank you," he spoke in a low voice, "not to refer to the former Jupiter-Minister of the Celestian Unorthodox Church as a 'demented old fuck'. Rushabh was a mentor of mine, and I was very close to him."

Van Nanseer winked, but as Ozland held his cold glare, his face quickly fell blank. "My comments were inappropriate and uncalled for," he rattled off, "as a representative of ThauCorp's many New Zealand-based subsidiaries, I apologise wholly and unreservedly. We hope to keep doing business with the new regime." The exec paused, and then reached into his jacket. He took out a card and handed it to Ozland. "Could I give you my business card so we can keep in touch?"

Ozland held the card in his hand. It was cream-coloured with golden edges. He glanced back at Evelyn, who was busy dealing with an obnoxious Dragon-affiliated reporter, talking smoothly while making the 'please deal with this person' code-sign behind her back. Eventually an unsympathetic-looking pair of guards gently lead the reporter away. That Rushabh had killed himself was both good and bad: good in that foul-play wouldn't be suspected, and bad in that it wouldn't cast the upper echelons of the Celestian Church in a very favourable light. _Evelyn must be pissed. I wonder how it got out?_

"No, I'm afraid not." He flicked the card into the grass. Another moment of concentration, and it erupted into flames. It was good to remind people sometimes. Leaving an open-mouthed Henry van Nanseer behind him, he exchanged bland pleasantries with diplomats, statespeople, weapons dealers, gang leaders, ice cream execs, and donors, who all became a steady blur of suits and expensive watches. It barely required any thought at all, no more than walking or breathing.

It gave him some time to think, to push the dreadful unreality that was Hogwarts out of his mind. He'd maintained that wonderful illusion for a few minutes, thinking that maybe he could maintain his tenuous sanity by pretending it had all been a dream, before he'd rushed back indoors after Evelyn had hurled abuse at him, looking for his formal wear. In doing so, he discovered a merlot-red satchel, filled with all of his wands and all of his textbooks, left with a little note from Dumbledore whose exact wording he couldn't remember now. It was a potent reminder that nothing could ever be the way it had been before. In the early morning, there had been Rushabh's suicide. In the late morning, the defector-priest began floating around and recounting his alien-abduction story. And then, of course, in the evening, the owls had delivered him the letters.

 _You should be crying, or something_ , said an insistent voice in his head.

 _I don't really feel any need to cry._

 _So you don't feel sad that Rushabh died?_

The thought occurred to him that no, he didn't. The thought bounced around inside his skull, becoming more and more hysterical. He didn't feel sad, or bad, or anything. He hadn't been drinking last night. In fact, up until he'd woken up at his house, he'd completely forgotten about Rushabh. Was that normal?

Maybe the naive eight-year-old Ozland still believed Rushabh's soul had been absorbed into the Collective Unconscious and that he hadn't died at all, that all he would have to do would be to wait for the Celestians to transport the followers of the Church to Planet Celestia and then Rushabh would be there, wondering what took him so damn long and would he go fetch another beer from the fridge?

A hush descended, and the Mars-Minister of Rituals came up to the front to deliver his speech. He could sense the oppressive, titanic weight of inevitability bearing down on him. He felt utterly powerless.

"So this is it, isn't it?"

 **##**

The Rituals Minister brought out a long scroll. A beat of hesitation before –

"Evelyn Rawter."

"Yes?"

"That's what's on the paper," the Minister's face was gray and slightly sickly. "Evelyn Catherine Matchwell Rawter."

 _What?_

She hadn't prepared for this, not at all.

Ozland looked merely perplexed, but kept clenching and unclenching his jaw in a way that suggested to Evelyn that the proclamation had rattled him deeply.

It occurred to her that everyone was staring in her direction. _Say something, dammit!_

She stood up. "This is highly irregular, but I will ensure that the succession proceeds smoothly and with minimal disruption."

Perhaps the words had flown out of her mouth a little too effortlessly. Ozland glanced up at her suspiciously, he probably suspected it was planned. But there wasn't anything wrong with preparedness, was there?

And then the realisation struck her with full force. _I'm the Jupiter-Minister._ She had to repeat it a few times like an affirmation, otherwise she wouldn't believe it.

Evelyn looked around. It felt as if there was some other thing, some other element that would be needed to complete –

"I assent to and fully support Miss Rawter's ascension to the Jupiter-Ministership," said Ozland glibly. "Rushabh's choice was unexpected, but I am relieved to see that the stewardship of the New Zealand division of the Celestian Unorthodox Church has been placed in capable hands. I will not contest the Ministership at this point."

Astonished silence turned into a hubbub of frenzied discussion. Cameras flashed from the back.

"Ozland, you're a goddamned idiot."

"What?"

" _At this point?_ "

"Yes," he said, "at this point."

Evelyn rubbed her eyes, sitting down. "This is a fucking mess. You read the crowd right – they wanted something from you, but the way you did it suggests a whole equal-power dynamic. And then you _had_ to add 'at this point' which basically says you're waiting for your opportunity to seize back the throne."

"I'm not – "

"The Church _does not do_ unstable, the Church does not do _drama_. We present an image of _strict_ internal unity, and we make an example out of people who don't tow the line. We have a _single_ leader who is the central locus of the movement and their two lieutenants, _not_ a dual-power system or a triad!"

"Jesus, Ev, calm down!"

She laughed bitterly. "Aha, cold, condescending, cool-cucumber Ozland. Don't fucking pretend to be the voice of reason, why the fuck aren't you more worried?"

"I . . . " Ozland seemed genuinely lost. "I don't know. I should be. I just . . . all of this," he sighed, leaning forward and cupping his hands together. His voice came out almost in a whisper. "I feel like I'm walking through a dream. You _know_ I don't believe in, well, _Him_ anymore, how do you think I felt when the priest who defected from the 77 Church started floating around in the interrogation room?"

"I would think that you would reconsider your unfaith and have more appreciation for the gifts that God has given you during your time on Earth."

"Maybe that was the intended result."

"Huh?"

"Look, shit, just ignore me. What happens next?"

She had to think about that one. "Today? Nothing. I'll stay on as Mars-Minister of Propaganda and Public Relations, you'll stay on in General Affairs. Tomorrow? God knows."

A series of beeps came from Ozland's pocket. He glanced at his pager. "Kevin wants to meet with me at Denny's, probably wants to rant at me again. Peace and love, I guess," he said, the standard greet-and-goodbye for Unorthodoxists. Ozland turned to leave, and carelessly elbowed his way through the stream of people leaving the service.

She waved a brief, polite goodbye. "Peace and love," she called out.

 **##**

 _DENNY'S FAMILY RESTAURANT, WESTHAVEN HIGH-DENSITY URBAN LIVING ACCOMMODATION, NEW ZEALAND_

The Denny's had molded itself to their daily meetings in the same way that the passage of air gradually erodes canyons. The prices of all the dishes they usually ordered had lowered over time. There was a straight line from the door to Table 14 with nothing else in the way (with the exception of the forest of potted plants that occluded it from all sides), and there were five slight indentations in the squishy seat around the circular table. The table itself could best be described as abstract art in the medium of coffee stains.

Kevin waited outside.

Ozland found him and all of his mannerisms utterly fascinating. He was always tapping his feet, unless he was talking. The longer _you_ talked, the faster the tapping became. Every half-minute, he glanced at his watch and pulled at his sleeves. Throughout a conversation, he always clasped his hands together and leant forward, and then a few moments later, he would lean back, rocking back and forth like someone trying to keep upright on a dinghy being tipped by waves. He had the harried, flustered look of someone in a perpetual hurry.

As he and Ozland walked through the doors, he quickly counted the number of red tiles on the restaurant floor in a rapid flurry of numbers under his breath and straightened every napkin as they went past each empty table. He was clearly angry as they went up to the counter to order.

"I'll have the special soup," Ozland said.

"Too loud, can't you get quieter food?"

"A tall smoothie, then."

"Same issue. Slurp slurp slurp."

Ozland wondered if Kevin had a melting point, or if he was like one of those chemicals which stayed solid up until a certain temperature and then suddenly sublimed into a gas.

"Deep-fried, extra crunchy spring-rolls."

"Again, too loud."

"Actually no, I'll have all three, and Kevin will have mashed potatoes."

Kevin's face melted into confusion, as if he hadn't figured out that Ozland was deliberately spiting him, but seemed satisfied with the mashed potatoes. The woman nodded, heaped abundant praise on Ozland for a bridge infrastructure project he'd never heard of, and said she would send the bill to the Church. They went to sit down.

Ozland folded his arms and flicked his wrist. Everything went silent. "So, what is it? More problems with importing pickles from the Trans-Pacific?"

Kevin splayed out his fingers and seemed to glance at each in turn. "No. The end-month pickle imports from the Trans-Pacific Railway proceeded as expected. Seventy-six point seven tonnes, cash payment of one hundred and fifteen thousand undollars from the buyers. Two percent transaction fee. The bidding process begins later this evening, and the proceeds will be subject to the standard twelve percent import fee which will be added to the Vaults within three days." He paused, as if mechanically shifting into a different gear. "You killed Rushabh."

Ozland frowned. "Excuse me?"

"Rushabhhad been regularly requesting antidepressant medication for the past six months," Kevin somehow managed to carry off both anger and disinterest, "I reviewed the records. He rarely made public appearances. He only met with us in the morning sporadically. When he did, he seemed hungover and always left early. You made a phone call to him the night before he killed himself."

"But you said that _I_ killed him."

Kevin folded and unfolded his hands before speaking. "Semantics. Did the murderer kill the victim or was it his knife?"

"Fair. Keep going." Ozland leant back.

The Minister of Logistics was unperturbed. "You made a phone call to him the night before he killed himself. You were aware he was in a depressive state. He drinks very heavily on Sundays. You were aware that in all likelihood, he would pass the position of Jupiter-Minister onto you. You were also aware that the correct prompting could make him commit suicide. Evelyn told me how you looked yesterday, when he informed you about his death. She said you looked like you were in shock. But it is easy to mistake shock for casual indifference, or for that matter, foreknowledge." He continued. "People tend to interpret social cues contextually rather than as probabilistic representations of internal mental states, which is where I believe her error in judgement came from."

 _Alright, I think I've had enough of this_. He shook his head, putting on a resigned expression. "So it was _you!_ "

"Excuse me?" Kevin seemed affronted by the sudden shift.

"I can't believe I didn't make the connection before. As Minister of Logistics, you control the inflow and outflow of every pill and tablet in the country. Your parents are doctors, professors of medicine – you carefully charted every single one of Rushabh's mood swings, his low ebbs, his depressive bouts, his behaviour, how he spoke, when he left – there was no single other man in Auckland more acutely aware of Rushabh's state of mind than you, Kevin. And how undervalued you felt! A brilliant mind, atrophying in the subordinated bureaucratic jumble that is the position of the Mars-Minister of Logistics for the North Shore City Region – what tragedy!

"Everywhere you saw a system running off-time, unused, underutilisation and overutilisation, bloated departments, corrupt ministers, fat to trim – but what could a man chained to his office do? And then a fantastic idea struck you! Rushabh, Ozland, Evelyn, Dom – the Commanding Ministers, people listened to them, didn't they? They gave orders, people obeyed. What good you could do if only you had a higher role! So one night, you adulterated one of Rushabh's antidepressants, and oh, it was so easy – too easy, to push Rushabh off the edge of the cliff. He was a nuclear-armed madman at the end of his rope, no-one would suspect a single thing! But a problem emerged – Evelyn and I would obviously want to cover up the suicidal aspect of it, possibly broadcasting it as a political assassination, and the title would go to me, not you, with no controversy.

"So what better a plan than, upon hearing of Rushabh's as-expected death, to leak the news before we had time to prepare? To throw a wrench into the propaganda machine and disrupt the – "

"Enough!" Kevin roared, "Minister Cunningham," he continued in a quieter voice, as if unsure of himself, his eyes unusually tense, "you may think that you can successfully run the Church using deception and clever wordplay as a substitute for practical and sustainable governance. You have never known anything but power, and the idea that you could lose power through misunderstanding the hegemonic mechanisms and the day-to-day systems underlying the perpetuation of your power, is, so far as I can see, a concept alien to you. Your fantastic delusions have entranced the Church, its upper echelons, and its followers, save for myself." He tilted his head. "You will find that reality can only be fooled for so long, and when the day comes, when it refuses to be fooled more, I will be ready to step forward to return sanity to the Church."

Ozland jaw had tightened, by a fraction of an inch. _Maybe my improvised piss-take had an element of truth._ "My phone call was to do with the updated uniform designs. Please don't interrupt my busy schedule with pointless murder accusations in future and keep your _personal_ dislike of me separate from your work as a civil servant, you fuckingslice of _shit_ ," he shouted, abruptly standing up. He realised he was shaking.

Kevin only stared into his drink.

 _Breathe in._

He left the table, brushing away the potted plants.

 _Four second hold_.

He strode at a quick clip across the diner, attracting curious looks.

 _Slowly breathe out._

He reached the door.

 _Six second hold._

He flung open the door.

 _Repeat._

Ozland cupped his face in his hands, leaning back against the grubby facade of the building. He had come out into a corridor, eight floors up.

The wall he faced bore a neon blue sign, the symbol of the Unorthodox Church. It was the letter C, bisected with the Christian cross, like a cent symbol. Below it was a tiny photograph of Saint Matchwell, along with a stylised illustration of Evelyn, her sunglasses tilted down quizzically. He was there too, in the form of a political placard stapled into the drywall.

Hundreds of thousands had fled to New Zealand during the civil wars across the Pacific in the seventies. Hyperdense Urban Living Accommodations were Saint Matchwell's prescription for the resulting crisis: ten levels of three by three metre cells, a thousand on each floor. Fifty thousand times denser population-wise than the surrounding city, HULAs were effectively human sardine cans. Each floor had a chapter of the Church. Since alternative reading material was scarce, HULA children learned to read through the Matchwell Revelations and the Celestian Messages, which was all for the best, really, in the end.

Ozland glanced up at the roof. Was it porridge, matted seaweed, tofu, or all three? Most of the HULAs had never been officially finished – people brought in their own materials and continued where contractors had left off. The dividing walls between apartments had been knocked down to make long, winding passageways lit by crude fluorescent tubes.

Judging by their pale faces, many residents hadn't stepped outside their HULA in years. A single undollar note could circulate around inside a single unit for a decade before passing outside to be exchanged for fresh vegetables, oil, machine parts, and livestock. Some HULAs had their own cute little gangs which divided up sections of floors as territory and occasionally had cute little gang wars with cute little body-counts, he had been amused to learn.

 _I'm distracting myself. This is a mess, this is a fucking mess and I made the mess, why did I make this mess?_

The sound of sloshing water echoed through the corridor, and a blonde woman walking her poodle came from around the corner. She stopped when she saw him.

"Cunningham?" the woman asked with a disinterested Australian drawl. The poodle yapped.

Ozland stared back at her and eventually nodded.

"I've been told to give this to you." She brought out a yellow parcel from her handbag. "Correspondence," she elaborated, putting a cigarette in her mouth. "Got a lighter?"

"The den is a few minutes away," Ozland said, turning over the parcel in his hands warily. "Why couldn't they just mail me over the Red Mundial?"

"I just give the parcels, sweetie," the woman replied, continuing her stroll down the dark passageway. "Take that up with them when you see them, huh?"

 _Them?_

The mystery didn't last for very long. The message had been typewritten on blue-cornered office paper.

His name was handwritten along the top – a touch of personality, but Ozland still had the distinct sense that the letter was just an end-product, spat out of a vast, indifferent corporate machine with a trillion moving parts that he would never be able to comprehend. It was as impersonal as a tax form.

 _Dear Mr. Min. Gen. Affairs 'O Wise Ldr. Of The 1000 Stars Hgh. Priest Gd.-King Ozland Cunningham,_

 _We request your presence to discuss the possibility of ThauDevelopment – A Subsidiary of ThauCorp acquiring land in an area currently under the jurisdiction of the Authority of the Celestian Unorthodox Church._

 _Please meet us at the standard location._

 _Yours graciously,_

 _Henry van Nanseer_

 _Chief of Internal Coordination_

 _ThauDevelopment – A Subsidiary of ThauCorp_

 **#######**

LEVEL 808, CENTRAL OFFICE, THAUCORP DEVELOPMENTAL AREA

Ozland had identified it, the vague sense of unease. _I'm off my game._ It was Kevin's murder accusation that had been bothering him. Why would he make himself a target? Was he recording the conversation? What was the point of saying it in the first place? There were too many unknowns and not enough answers.

The trip to the ThauCorp Developmental Area only put him more on edge. There were rumours about the Developmental Area: enormous towers reaching into the sky, underground facilities, biological weapons testing, mysterious abandoned buildings with flickering lights – it was a positive cornucopia of conspiracy and intrigue.

Naturally, it was only allowed because neighbouring paragovs like the Celestian Church were making millions of pounds from ground rent. ThauCorp also provided a natural buffer against Ātete, an indigenous land-reclamation guerilla army with a penchant for sudden waves of aggression.

"Ozland?"

He realised he'd zoned out. "Yes?"

They were in an office on the 308th floor, from which only the evening sky was visible through the windows. They were seated around a rectangular blue table.

"As I was saying," van Nanseer continued, pouring a thick dossier of documents onto the tabletop, "we're looking to lease the northern portion of Glen Eden for the standard fifty-year period."

"Why?" Ozland asked, frowning. "It's not contiguous with the rest of the Developmental Area, is it?" _And why not just rent it on a monthly basis?_ It indicated that the Board had become confident in the stability of the Church.

The businessman seemed confused. "It's contiguous with Sunnyvale and Kelston. Rushabh drew up the deal earlier last month."

 _What the hell?_ He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Alright, go on."

Van Nanseer looked at him strangely and coughed. "We're prepared to offer thirty million British pounds."

"One hundred million pounds," Ozland said automatically. "An eighth of that in gold futures, a quarter in Negaloth shares, and another quarter in five-year Soviet bonds. Can you arrange that?"

Van Nanseer smiled. "I'll take it to the board. Pleasure doing business with you, Cunningham."

"The same," he replied, still distracted.

He took the metro back to his house unaccompanied (Evelyn would scold him later) and collapsed into bed.

Something felt wrong.

 **#######**

FEBRUARY 3, 1931 – LEVEL MINUS FOUR, MINISTRY OF MAGIC

For eight seconds, everything was still.

And then life continued. In Diagon Alley, glasses clinked in celebration of Emir Quarfaad's visit to Britain. In Hogsmeade, butterbeer disappeared with a heavy _glug_ down the throats of wizards and witches. In Malfoy Manor, the nobility made polite conversation as clocks chimed to midnight, eight seconds late.

But the jubilant atmosphere stopped at the iron door of the Department of Mysteries.

In the corridors, there was a heightened sense of dread. Paranoia had infected every passageway. Voices were lowered. Words were whispered softly.

Thirty minutes later, the Head Unspeakable was pacing frantically about in his office, with the growing realization that _someone_ had done something wrong, and _he_ would be the one to be blamed.

"Time stopped for eight seconds? You're certain?"

"Very, sir," Rookwood replied.

"Anyone we can blame?"

Rookwood pondered this. "Samuels, probably, sir. Without the special clock he invented, we wouldn't have noticed it –"

The Department Director gave him a blank look. "The special clock?"

"– the one that measures the number of seconds per second –"

"Ah, yes."

"– and the chances are one in an obsquatumatillion it'll ever happen again, sir. Just a minor surge in the Cup's thaumic output causing a buffer overflow in the Ward of the Thirteen."

Rookwood watched as his superior sat himself down at the bloodoak desk, cleared away mounds of paperwork, and started thoughtfully drumming his fingers on the worn surface, before it began to float gently up towards the ceiling. The Director leant in on the desk in a natural motion, keeping it pinned down to the floor, and then started floating along with the desk. Unwilling to concede defeat, he seemed to come to the conclusion that no embarrassment could result if he simply ignored it. The wizard was a few centimetres above the ground when he suddenly opened up with a rapid-fire barrage of questions. "Splinches at the temporal interfaces?"

"No –"

"Divergences in thaumometer readings?"

"Nothi–"

"Leyline breakages?"

"None that we –"

"Have the Unseelie risen once more from the twisting fractal depths of Tir inna n-Og?"

"Er . . . no?"

"So, to be clear," the Head Unspeakable intoned, floating still higher, "nothing, _nothing_ which we would, in our duties as guardians of ancient lore, gatekeepers of eldritch horrors beyond the mortal ken of man, tamers of the raging primordial elemental forces, etcetera etcetera etcetera, _nothing_ which we would be _obliged_ to inform the Minister of in the upcoming budgetary session?"

"Well . . . I'll have to fill out a form, sir. Unintentional temporal malpractice. I, er, faintly recall," Rookwood said. (He was familiar enough with the form to have caught himself subconsciously tracing its outlines in the fogged window by his desk.)

"Good, good," the Director muttered distractedly, his head slowly nearing the ceiling. "I'm sure you're aware of what this _looks_ like, Rookwood. It looks like we're overstepping the boundaries. It looks like we're mismanaging our mysticism, debauching our divine powers –"

"– I'm sure, sir –"

"– abusing the occult, exploiting our esotericism –"

"– I think I understand –"

"– perverting prophecy, _ouch_ , corrupting our karm . . . er . . . karmicosity . . . yes, indeed." The wizard straightened his glasses, and sighed, head now planted firmly in plasterboard. From below, he had all the seeming of a bureaucrat ascended to a higher managerial plane of being. "Ward of the Thirteen, Ward of the Thirteen. Rookwood, why _does_ that name ring a bell?"

"Erm, it's the ward that supports all the other wards, sir," Rookwood said, wondering if it would've been considered impolite to look up. "Merlin and a bunch of other fancy wizards whipped it up in the one-hundreds. It was, er, originally erected to defend us from the ice-mages of Orendel but, well, feature creep, I suppose. According to the ancient scrolls we looked at, the time-stopping component was meant to temporarily halt Daevite encroachment, but the only thing we found on the Daevites in the Department Archival Library was a small black book with a note stuck to it which said to never read it or bring it within fifteen metres of human blood."

"And this . . . defense mechanism . . . activated . . . why?"

Rookwood coughed. "The ward's only rated for twenty trillion thaums, but ever since we plugged the Cup into the central Nexus, it's been getting much more juice than it's rated for. The Great Enchanter was holidaying in Belgium when it happened so he dismissed it – otherwise we'd have been frozen forever."

"That bloody Cup _has_ been causing a fair share of nuisance, hasn't it? Why don't we just smash the ruddy thing up?"

"Olymp Kagnarr from the ICW's Bad Things Division says if the Cup so much as gets knocked over, it would melt the Earth and a few other things besides."

The Director jolted in his seat. "Merlin, we have a potential _Earth-and-other-things-besides-destroying_ artifact here?"

"Um, yes."

"Make sure to mention it in the budgetary session. I want them to know I'm as mad as a Mudlomper, unhinged as a broken door, semi-psychotic, away with the færies, and ready to melt the Earth and a few other things besides at a moment's notice, and then we'll see how long it takes for them to cut a few thousand Galleons from the damn DMLE."

"Noted. In the meanwhile, should I look into ways to discharge the thaumic surplus, perhaps to some trusted third parties?"

 **#######**

Dear Editor,

I am SHOCKED and APPALLED at the HORRENDOUS quality of this year's home appliances! My light fixtures have stopped working, my deep freeze refuses to operate, my radio is stuck on one channel, and my toaster EXPLODED in a shower of sparks yesterday! In fact, not a SINGLE electrical device in my entire household is functioning properly.

SHAME on British corporations who use CHEAP and NASTY manufacturing methods!

So far, only Negaloth's appliances have proved functional and what a BEAUTY they are! Negaloth was kind enough to replace all of my appliances with patented Negaloth technology.

I urge readers to purchase ONE Negaloth device and see how BRILLIANTLY they operate.

Kind Regards,

Margaret Gullikson

– March 5, 1936 (Dorset Gazette)

 **#######**

HOGWARTS, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS, REPUBLIC OF SCOTLAND – THE HERE AND NOW

Dawn came to Hogwarts. It washed over the gardens, tickled the stonework, brushed the tips of the towers, and eventually struck Ozland in the face with full force.

His first bizarre thought as he woke up was that he had been imprisoned. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all stone. Apparently, somehow he'd been taken back to Hogwarts and these would be his accommodations.

The one window, off in the far corner, was done in coloured glass: a knight wildly swinging a sword at a green dragon. As he looked closer, the dragon roared, and tessellated shards of red and orange glass erupted from its mouth. When he looked next, the dragon and the knight had rolled out a piece of cloth and were picnicking together on top of the hill. Then, once the last crystalline sandwich had been eaten, they were back at it again with renewed vigour.

Shaking his head, Ozland got out of bed. He looked around the room more. There was a door at the end, of course, but it was otherwise bare.

He went up to the coloured glass and tapped it. "Oi you, where're the showers?"

The small knight figure motioned at the door with its sword, but otherwise seemed to ignore him.

The door only lead to a corridor, and the corridor lead to a main passageway of sorts, layered with paintings on either side. Ozland was surprised there had been enough people in all of wizarding Britain's history to paint portraits of, although, he supposed, some of them might have been made up by the artists. (Which in turn implied that whatever process was used to make new paintings also created fully-fledged consciousnesses with their own memories and personalities as a byproduct.)

"I suppose I ought to ask again," he said.

"Ask what?" came a reply from his left. The voice sounded distant and had a slight reverb.

He looked to his left: there was a glum painting of a dimly-lit corridor, much like the one he'd come down. Hung up on one of its walls, rimmed with gold, done in little brushstrokes, was a tiny painting inside the painting – a princess, from what he could tell, dressed in florid blue. "Where are the showers?" he asked, fascinated.

"Come again?"

"Where are the showers?" Ozland said again, much louder.

"Oh," said the princess-painting, "you'll have to excuse me, the acoustics in this hall aren't that good. And why in the name of Merlin would you want to have a shower like a commoner?"

"What else would I do?"

"The Clean-Up Charm, naturally," the meta-painting replied, seeming confused.

"I don't know it."

"It's simple. Say ' _Lasciato_ ', and then do this."

"Do what?"

"What I'm doing with my wand right now, you dolt."

"Er, the brushstrokes aren't fine enough for me to see what's going on," Ozland said, embarrassed. "Just looks like a blurry squiggle to me."

The princess sighed. "I'll have to fetch the Meta-Man."

"Who?"

"The man who can go up and down painting levels."

" . . . how many of those are there, exactly?"

The meta-painting seemed to consider this. "Well, about eight hundred going down – I'm not sure how many there are going up, though. Are _you_ a painting, by any chance?"

"Er, I don't think so."

" _Think_ so or _know_ so? And do you want me to fetch the Meta-Man or not?"

"If you would be so kind."

The princess left her frame, presumably in search of the mysterious Meta-Man.

It didn't take too long. The perspective of the painting started to look more and more wrong. Black lines bled and perspectives bulged, colours collapsed into sickly gray-greens. The brushstrokes in the painting began to wriggle like earthworms, knotting and melting until the Meta-Man took shape.

The Meta-Man, Ozland thought, wasn't really a man. He was a grotesque, brutal geometric abstraction, covered in charcoal veins. Nine pairs of blinking eyes roiled about on his body. The only thing that made him barely human was a red business-tie running down his front. Looking at him filled Ozland with the irrational fear that someday he would find out how to bleed into the real world.

As he watched with horrified intrigue, the Meta-Man somehow drew himself a hand, which then drew a brush, which drew another hand, and then a wide, thick-lipped mouth filled with uneven teeth. And then finally, a wand.

One of the Meta-Man's eyes drifted across its body to look at the princess-painting, who motioned with her wand. The Meta-Man copied. A twirl, then a vertical line from top to bottom.

" _Lasciato_ ," it growled. The canvas of the painting rippled and bulged.

"Thanks for all the help," Ozland half-squeaked, darting down the passageway.

 **###**

After some time, tracing back his steps, Ozland realised he was lost. It was absurd – it had only been five minutes or so of wandering down a straight hall, but when he looked for the corridor he'd come from, he only found a grotty stairwell that kept on descending and descending until it came to an abrupt dead-end with an oil painting of an artist with a curly moustache, painting a self-portrait. Water dripped from the low ceiling.

"Excuse me," he said to the artist, almost only to break the dreadful silence, "I'm lost."

The artist kept painting, ignoring him until: "And where would you be trying to get to?"

It had the vaguest hint of a French accent.

"I don't know," Ozland replied, "I was hoping you'd help me figure that out, too."

"Ah," the painted-artist said, dipping its brush into violet gouache, "then you must first know what you want."

"Um, okay, that's useful advice in general, I guess – I just want breakfast."

"Go up the stairs, go down the corridor, and turn eight lefts."

At this point, Ozland wasn't going to bother questioning it. "Turn eight fucking lefts," he muttered under his breath, breaking into a jog.

The architecture of Hogwarts, however, was unwilling to accommodate the simplicity of lefts and rights. The end of one candle-lit corridor had a clear 90-degree left turn, but as he rushed closer and closer, it began straightening out, and by the time he'd reached it, it was a rightward U-bend that turned into a spiral stairwell. He opted to walk backward since technically it would still count as a left, and every revolution of the stairwell would be another turn.

And so he ended up crashing into Dumbledore, who was walking up the stairs.

"Ah, Ozland," he boomed, "a fortunate coincidence. Professor Trelawney is expecting us."

"I was just looking for breakfast – "

Dumbledore twiddled his fingers, and a white dining plate accompanied by a knife and a fork fell from nowhere, settling to float in front of him. The wizard proceeded to reach into the pockets of his robe, pulled out an unlabelled can, opened it, and poured steaming baked beans onto the plate. "Everlasting baked beans," he said, by way of explanation, "one of the exceptions to the Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law," and began snapping his fingers.

Two sausages, a hash brown, a poached egg, and a small saucer filled with green stew fell neatly onto the plate with each snap.

"Thanks," Ozland murmured, following Dumbledore. The plate kept hovering in front of him, and as soon as he'd reached the top of the stairs, he began digging in. (He wasn't confident that he could safely eat with a knife and fork and walk up a stairwell at the same time.)

They reached another stairwell going up, done in chessboard marble.

"So Professor Trelawney is the careers advisor?"

"Professor Trelawney is Hogwarts' Divinations Professor," Dumbledore said, fiddling with a knot in his beard. "Aside from her work in financial consultancy, crystal orb repair, relationship counselling, property investment, and insurance, she is our resident careers advisor."

"She can predict the future?"

"If only it were so simple." Dumbledore sighed, finally undoing the beard-knot that had been causing him grief and in doing so creating two more.

He asked Ozland to make sure he was standing on a white square, and using a staff that hadn't been in his hand until a moment before, he tapped at the chequered marble floor. Immediately, the square Ozland had been standing on began to separate itself from the rest, accelerating up the stairwell, causing the others around it to fly apart around it, like the tiles on a scrabble board after being violently shook.

The door was ajar. Ozland pushed, and Dumbledore followed.

Professor Trelawney's room was strangely comforting. It was wide and open, but felt curiously snug. Purple draperies, curtains and carpets were everywhere, and in the centre, there were about fifty evenly-spaced, circular tables – each with a kettle. It smelt strongly of cinnamon and oranges.

"Ah, Albus," came a voice from across the room. "What can I do for – no, of course, Master Dwimmersmith is here to have his potential career paths examined."

"Uncanny as always," Dumbledore said, his eyes twinkling, and then in a lowered, conspiratorial voice, "were it not for the fact that I scheduled this appointment – "

" – four weeks ago," Professor Trelawney said, "and I foresaw that you would schedule the appointment so I scheduled an appointment for you to schedule the appointment."

Dumbledore shook his head. "As I said, uncanny. Ozland, this is – ah, I've already introduced you – and Sybill, this is – hmm, I see introductions will not be necessary." At Ozland's uncertain look, he added: "Across from the tables, behind the curtain."

He then promptly vanished in a ball of fire (Ozland decided to put off thinking about that one for the moment).

The Divination Professor seemed to pride herself on her oddness, like most of the wizarding world. She had thick glasses that gave her eyes a bulbous look, and cultivated frizzy hair. Moreover, she was sitting in front of fifty cups of tea, all of them in the process of being stirred and refilled by some unseen mechanism. As Ozland sat himself down in front of her desk, he noticed her eyes were flitting from cup to cup, as if checking each one. After some time, she began furiously scribbling down notes on parchment.

"Tasseomancy – tea-reading, of course," Professor Trelawney said, profoundly, "but you already know that. You're wondering what I'm doing with fifty cups of tea, and you're also wondering how they're being stirred."

A long, dramatic pause followed this remark. "The answer to your second question is a combination of the runic transform of the Refilling Charm, which is fueled by Hogwarts' leylines, and a generic motion-effect Charm adapted to stir the tea. Would you like to know the answer to the first question, then?"

He nodded.

The Divination Professor told him to pick up a cup, take it in his left hand, and move it in a circle rapidly three times from left to right.

"Should I drink it now, then?"

"Don't be silly," she said, tapping the rim of the cup with her wand. The liquid immediately disappeared, leaving only light-green water at the bottom along with scattered fragments of tea leaves. "Now," the witch pointed to a series of little black clumps stuck to the side, "what do these look like to you?"

Ozland paused, considering. "A boat . . . and a cloud, oh and that one looks like a fox."

Professor Trelawney stared at him, in an odd, piercing way, as if she had divined some deep and unknowable truth and decided not to say it aloud. "Very good," she said slowly, "now, any of these symbols can represent any number of things. The fox is an opportunity, or a friend who has turned against you, the boat is a journey – physical or metaphorical, and the cloud is changing circumstances . . . usually for the worse. The meaning is amplified by the positional relations between the symbols, you see – impressive, certainly, but not _useful_ or _actionable_."

"I see," Ozland said, barely keeping up. "But why would clumps . . . no, I have a better question – why would a clump of leaves that _looked_ like a fox have anything to do with opportunity?"

"Why do fairy-tales have evil stepmothers? Why do stories have beginnings, middles, and ends? Why do birds fly in flocks, and why are buildings made of bricks? The fox is a unit, a symbol of the deep subconscious, and it is only through contextualising it, _renewing_ it, as a symbol of opportunity or betrayal that it acquires a meaning, Mr. Dwimmersmith."

"But you could contextualise the fox to mean _anything_ ," he argued.

Professor Trelawney smiled for the first time he had seen her. "Precisely. Now, suppose a blacksmith wanted to know where he ought to set up shop in France? Would 'opportunity' and 'betrayal by a friend' suit his purposes?"

"I wouldn't think so." Ozland leaned forward, thinking intensely. "Oh, so you're constructing new interpretive systems. Ones that need more than one cup."

"Precisely. What you see in front of you, Mr. Dwimmersmith, is a General Diviner." The Divination Professor sat back, seeming utterly satisfied, and then suddenly frowned. "Or, at least, the beginnings of one. I suspect a few thousand more cups will be needed. The issue, unfortunately, is any system I design, I'll have to be able to remember in complete detail while I'm stirring the teacups – but a Universal Diviner would require a very large system indeed."

"That's quite the conundrum," Ozland said sympathetically. "Will this set-up be able to tell me about what career I should choose?"

"Career?" Professor Trelawney said, blankly. "Oh, yes." She lazily motioned with her hand, and a sheet of paper flew from the ceiling. "I'll just need to refresh," she murmured, scanning over the paper. "It's the trouble, every meaning-system has to be simultaneous and relational, so you won't ever be able to extract a simple English sentence from a Specific Diviner – all the tea-leaves settle down into clumps at the same time, after all. And each symbol-combination has to relate to the meaning _somehow_."

"Hmm."

Professor Trelawney put the paper down, closing her eyes and seeming to concentrate. " _Twenty-five, up, stir, drain_ ," she commanded. Half of the cups rose into the air and did exactly that. What was left was an enormous marbled pattern that stretched across a table.

The witch peered at the cups, consulted the notes, and looked up once more.

There was a long silence.

"Oh, dear. This has never happened before."

 **#######**


	7. Ch7 – The Secret Society Secret Society

**A/N: Only one month this time, I think.**

 _ **#######**_

 _ **Irish Wizarding Gazette**_

 **DRAGON ON TOP OF MOUNTAIN ACCUSED OF TAX EVASION**

The dragon who lives in the cave on the top of Mt Dweomdale has recently come under fire due to an anonymously-penned letter, purported to have been written by three prominent Ministry taxpeople, who claimed that the dragon has used various shell corporations to cheat the Ministry out of approximately forty thousand Galleons over the past ten years. The dragon, when asked to comment on the allegations, was seemingly insulted and affronted, calling the authors of the letter "the redistributionist knights of yore, reincarnated into bureaucratic busybodies", emphasising its continual investments into local Irish businesses and the magical community as a whole amounting to twenty million gold coins as of today, and its "positive role" as a "stimulator of economic growth".

The dragon made further comments, suggesting that if business conditions became unfavourable, it would "withdraw investment" and "eat everyone".

 _ **#######**_

THE NORTH TOWER, HOGWARTS, SOMEWHERE – 26 AUGUST, 1995

In the Divination classroom, a boy with gray-brown hair and a woman with coke-bottle glasses faced fifty cups of tea, all recently drained.

"Oh dear. This has never happened before."

"What hasn't happened before?"

"The Chudley Cannons will win 60-2 against the Wigtown Wanderers in the Quidditch Northwestern Regional Semi-Finals. It's a shame I'm banned from all of the betting clubs," she remarked, with a hint of wistfulness.

" _What about my future career_?"

"Oh, I suppose you could interpret it that way, too," Professor Trelawney coughed. She tapped her wand to a sheet of parchment, and the tea pattern quickly inked itself in, dot by dot. "Take this tea-pattern to the Ministry Office of Statistics, they'll process it," she said, handing it to him.

"And what am I . . . how am I supposed to get there?"

"Puddlejumping, but – oh, the caretakers will have fixed the leaky fountain by now, you'd better use the Hedge."

"The Hedge?" Evidently Professor Trelawney wasn't as perceptive as she'd appeared, or she was leaving implicit unanswered questions in all of her answers as some sort of incomprehensible game.

"You'll find it in the gardens that you saw when you came in with Professor Flitwick."

" . . . I had a fair bit of trouble with finding breakfast so I doubt I'll be able to make my way outside without directions."

The Divination Professor seemed to lose interest, turning back to her study of the tea leaves. "Just turn eight lefts, that usually does it."

Ozland turned to leave, stumbled over an uneven bit of carpet, and then turned back. "Hold on, I forgot to ask – er, no, I asked but I don't think I got the answer I was looking for – "

"An accident from a few years ago when Lord Riddley – the Rituals and DADA Professor at the time – covered for Pomona for a Seventh Year Herbology class."

"No, look, I'll be more clear – "

"Lean back against it while whispering 'Ministry Office of Statistics Core', but make sure to say 'Core', or else it might take you to one of the non-Core universes on the Registrar and you'll living the rest of your life in a lower reality without realising it. It's happened before," she added, shrugging.

After turning eight lefts and crossing a drawbridge that didn't go over anything so far as he could tell, he wandered through the garden (which was quite lovely) and came to the Hedge. Ozland hadn't encountered many menacing hedges in his life, but this was certainly one of them. It stood twenty feet high, and the leaves were sharp as an overused simile. They weren't dark leaves either – not dark at all, but an infinitely more dangerous-looking shade of milky green.

All in all, it was the sort of hedge you'd expect to see growing around the home of a one-eyed man who nobody had ever seen except briefly as a window silhouette during a lightning storm after accidentally throwing a frisbee into his backyard at night.

Some hedges said things like 'don't lean against me, I have pollen and prickles', while this hedge was quite clearly saying: 'don't lean against me, _or else_.'

There was something vaguely discomforting about the idea that it could send him to another universe. He'd go back to Hogwarts and everyone would be part-Neanderthal and he probably wouldn't realise anything was wrong until the Core Ministry issued a missing persons notice except that it'd be too late since he'd already had three children and been expelled from Stanford after publishing a doctoral thesis entitled 'A Novel Means of Reversing Cryptographic Transformations of Names of God'.

"Ministry Office of Statistics Core," he murmured, resigned, and leant back into the Hedge, which quite readily gave way. Branches closed around his field of vision. Hogwarts became fragments of architecture, only visible as gaps between the leaves.

 _ **##**_

The time Ozland spent inside the Hedge was an eternity, made all the more disquieting by the constant wriggling and squirming of the branches, shuffling his body to some unseen destination. He had the unshakeable feeling that the Hedge was being tender and careful with him, like child hugging a teddy-bear on the verge of falling apart, or a very big person hugging a very smaller person while trying not to shatter any of their bones. At one point, he heard the distinctive sounds of a motorway and the honking of a horn, and the skeletal branches in the Hedge quickly tugged him upward, after which the motorway sounds became softer and disappeared. It was all mostly dark, except for a few sprinklings of light – white, blue, and sometimes green and orange, which allowed him to see apples attached to some of the branches, but that didn't last for very long before he was squeezed out from a potted plant into a humming, thrumming room.

For the Office of Statistics, it didn't look too busy. The humming, thrumming room was bare save for a bored-looking clerk sitting at a mahogany desk, on top of which perched a little box with hints of cogs and wheels poking out, from which all the humming and thrumming was originating. It was also rather small – a tad larger than a work cubicle – and filled with pipes, all of which fed into the little box.

"How may I help you?" The clerk's nose was buried in a book, and accordingly the words came out as muffled and all jammed together, as if they were a super-word in some language whose vocabulary consisted entirely of perfunctory phrases.

Ozland swallowed and waved about the speckled parchment. "It's a tea-pattern, to do with careers." He stopped, and started again. "Professor Trelawney said I should come here."

Apparently this was enough for the clerk to make sense of, for he took the parchment from Ozland, rolled it up, tied a blue ribbon around it, and fed it into a hole in the machine.

Maybe he was imagining it, but Ozland thought he could hear a whirring sound above the mechanical din, and all of a sudden, the machine spat out a long string of paper. The clerk promptly took the paper, unhooked what looked like a metal plunger from the back of the machine and suckered it to his lips.

"Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33, request for tea-reading interpretation, subsection: career orientation. Message is as follows: Twenty two point five, sixty-three point zero, ninety-eight point two, seven point zero, three point two eight nine, one hundred and nine point three. End." The office-clerk spoke, reading off the paper. Each word had a garbled reverb, as if it was bouncing around between two sheets of scrunched-up aluminium foil.

Soon enough, a crisp female voice came back, coming from every direction, like an airport announcement. "Head of Computation, message to Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33. Reply is as follows, in ranked order: one, prophecy reinterpretation, two, land expansion, three, foreign relations office. End."

"Got that?" the clerk asked, turning back to his book.

"So those are the jobs I've been assigned?"

Eyebrows arched. "Heavens, no. Those are the jobs you'll end up _doing_."

"Then what's the point of all of this, then?"

"So," the clerk said, slowly, "you can prepare to _do_ them while you're at Hogwarts . . . unless you're an Underperson?"

"No – "

"Oh, good," the clerk visibly relaxed, "some of them figured out how to undo the Foreign Accent Jinx, and killed their counterparts in the Core to take their place. Awful shit. Muggleborn, then?"

"It's rather complicated, but hold up – if I study prophecy reinterpretation at Hogwarts and I wouldn't have studied it otherwise, isn't the, er, tea reading causing what it's supposed to predict in the first place?"

"Well," the office-wizard said, not seeming to give the matter much thought, "everything has to be caused by something."

"Well – "

"So really, if you don't end up working in the Department of Mysteries, then what made the tea-reading say you would work there in the first place? It's a logical contradiction, innit? Can't happen."

At Ozland's thoughtful silence, he went back to his book.

"Er, sorry to trouble you again – but how might I get back to Hogwarts?"

"And how am I supposed to know _that_?"

"I thought you might, that's all."

The clerk sighed, pulled the metal plunger out again, and placed it to his lips. "Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33, request for information, subsection: general. Message is as follows: how might a pesky Hogwarts student get back to Hogwarts?"

Half a minute passed. "Head of Computation, message to Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33. Reply is as follows: and how am I supposed to know _that_? End."

"Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33, general reply. Message is as follows: I thought you might, that's all. No worries. End."

"Head of Computation, message to Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33. Reply is as follows: I'll have to ask the Department of Transportation. End."

The tubes were silent for a while, before the same voice piped up again. "Head of Computation, message to Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33. Message is as follows: Department of Transportation wants to know whether the pesky Hogwarts student knows how to ride a dragon, please reply. End."

"Well," said the clerk, "do you?"

"No," Ozland replied patiently, "of course I fucking don't."

"No need to get shirty – "

"I swear to fucking Matchwell, half of the time I spend here is using some nutty way of moving from – "

"Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33, general reply. Reply is as follows: No, he doesn't know how to ride a dragon."

" – one place to another. And how long is this going to take?"

"Shouldn't be too long," the clerk said pleasantly, flipping over to another page. "You know, the Ministry used to do so many pointless, counterproductive, useless things before Minister Tesla's reforms – now, we do them twenty percent faster."

A rumbling came through the tubes, heralding a message. "Head of Computation, message to Office of Statistics, Cubicle 33. Message is as follows: Department of Transportation says 'Go out the door and turn eight lefts.' End."

Ozland held up his finger, open-mouthed, and then went out the door.

 _ **###**_

They had filtered, one by one, into the expansive room in Hogwarts' south-west tower. Was it the room where Peeves threw pineapple cakes at a visiting Soviet delegation in 1956? Hermione wasn't sure, her brain was a little scattered today.

It couldn't help but be scattered, she reminisced – if she'd tried to make sense of the entire magical world at first glance, her brain wouldn't just be scattered; instead, little chunks of it would be landing on Neptune just about now.

For a long time, there was an uncomfortable silence in the circle of Muggleborns, and then a boy walked in, grinning uneasily. Althea Golledge, who, along with Penelope Clearwater, was sitting comfortably in the centre of the circle, cleared her throat – a rather rough, alarming sound. Hermione only knew her and Penelope's names because she'd politely pressed Professor McGonagall for every possible detail beforehand.

"Introductions, I think, would be appropriate. I'm Althea Golledge," she began, flatly. "I work in the Department of Mysteries as a project manager and I can't say any more than that."

"My name is Penelope Clearwater. I graduated last year," Penelope murmured, "desk clerk at the Ministry."

The uneasily-grinning boy introduced himself as Terry Boot, without elaboration.

Kevin Entwhistle just said his name quickly and quietly, his eyes darting about the room, as if waiting for someone to challenge him on the fact.

"Yosif Almazbekov," volunteered someone she couldn't see. "If you're thinking about my name, I just came here a few days ago from Kyrgyzstan. I'm looking forward to studying at Hogwarts and it's good to see my fellow students," he added, softly. Terry stared oddly at him.

"Ozland Cunningham," another boy said, and then paused, as if considering how to construct a particularly delicate sentence. "Both of my parents lived in Britain and were magical, but they died during the War and put me in the care of a Muggle couple in New Zealand. I . . . am involved in paragovernmental affairs."

She wondered what he'd left out. He'd definitely left something out. Nobody paused that long without leaving something out.

Everyone was looking at her now. "Hermione Granger," she said, her throat suddenly dry. "I'm ... well," _you'll all get to know me soon enough and I'd prefer not to box myself in by summarising who I am in a handful of words_ , she wanted to say, but, after swallowing nervously, she finally managed to say: "I'm from Heathgate and I was studying to be a dentist before I got my acceptance letter, but I don't think I'll be doing that now."

Althea chuckled, no one else did.

The last person who'd spoken was on the opposite side of the circle to Hermione and –

As she looked at that last person, three thoughts, in rapid succession, passed through her head.

The first was: _isn't he the one who fixed my pneumatic modulator?_

The second was: _oh, I remember, his name was Harry Evans-Verres._

Her heart skipped a beat.

The third wasn't a thought so much as the surprised 'oh!' of a sudden connection that her brain had made – the connection in this case being that the person who she'd gone to, to get a motorcycle part repaired, also defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named as a baby.

She kept quiet, wondering who else had figured it out.

There was a fourth thought, more of a subconscious voice, reprimanding her for not paying more attention.

"Oh, right," the ender-of-the-Wizarding-War said, almost absently, "Harry, pleased to make your acquaintances – Hermione, Ozland, Yosif, Kevin, Terry, Penelope, Althea." He nodded to everyone as he said their names

"Harry who?" asked Golledge, with a hint of impatience.

"Just Harry."

"Wait, what?"

 _ **###**_

 _Just Harry._

As he reached the drawbridge, Dumbledore's phoenix-Patronus had told him to go to the third room on the corridor on the third floor near the south-west tower. Ozland had asked, almost sarcastically, whether he should turn eight lefts to get there, and the phoenix had said:

"I see you're getting the hang of it."

And then it winked.

Sitting in that room, it suddenly occurred to Ozland that maybe the _Patronus_ had winked, rather than Dumbledore.

" . . . I'm looking forward to studying at Hogwarts and it's good to see my fellow students."

People were looking at him now. Oh, so they were going counter-clockwise?

"Ozland Cunningham," he said, immediately, and then stopped to think about how he would introduce himself. How had everyone else done it? Maybe, given how often this sort of thing was happening, he would do well to work out some sort of schema and prepare various introductions for different situations. He'd never needed to introduce himself before.

A long pause. "Both of my parents lived in Britain and were magical, but they died during the War and put me in the care of a Muggle couple in New Zealand. I . . . am involved in paragovernmental affairs."

There. He'd paused just long enough to create intrigue.

"Hermione Granger," said a girl, presumably Hermione Granger, who looked about his age – definitely younger than Penelope and Althea. "I'm ... well," she seemed flustered, "I'm from Heathgate and I was studying to be a dentist before I got my acceptance letter, but I don't think I'll be doing that now."

 _No shit_.

"Oh, right," muttered the boy next to him, "Harry, pleased to make your acquaintances – Hermione, Ozland, Yosif, Kevin, Terry, Penelope, Althea."

"Harry who?"

"Just Harry," said the boy.

"Wait, what?"

"Pardon?"

"What do you mean, 'Just Harry'?" said Althea.

"Oh, I see where the confusion is coming from," Harry said, helpfully, "my family name is spelt with silent letters. Only mute Dutch people can hear it."

If this was intended to provoke some further reaction, it failed, for Althea only shook her head. " _N'importe quois_. You're probably all wondering why we're here today. Unless someone has already figured it out – ?"

"We're all Muggleborns," Hermione said.

"Not all of you," Althea responded readily, "no, _all_ of you are entering into your Fifth Year with no prior knowledge of magic. To call that a _disadvantage_ is a catastrophic understatement. A good half of you," she said, "will fail. No, allow me to amend that – unless you are _exceptional_ , you will fail." She stared around the room, meeting everyone eye-to-eye. "Once you fail, you will be moved back a year. Once you fail that year, you will be moved back another year. There are four successive years for you to fail in, and each year you are moved back into will be more and more embarrassing than the last."

"That is," Penelope continued, "if you don't support each other. If you support each other, you might all be able to scrape a passing grade, and er, avoid getting picked on. I didn't have anyone to support me – I was, ah, I was the only Muggleborn in my year. I had to learn how to defend myself, but, well, defensive magic hasn't ever been my strong suit," she laughed uncertainly, "so I just holed up in the Ravenclaw Library." She seemed to shift in tone, and was deadly serious all of a sudden. "Don't end up in Slytherin. Ideally you want to be in Hufflepuff or with the Gryffindors, Ravenclaw as a third best. Also if you get injured, go to Madam Pomfrey immediately and don't be afraid to mention names. Dumbledore and McGonagall are also good people to go to, but they're both _really_ busy. Just keep your head down and avoid trouble, try and earn House points but don't look like a teacher's pet while you're doing it."

"And if you all end up in different Houses, the most important thing is to _stick together,_ " Althea said. "It might sound _cliché_ , it might sound _uninspiring_ , but unless you want to go back to being a goddamned dentist, you're going to have to do it."

There was a collective murmur of agreement. Hermione looked affronted.

"Which brings me to the real reason why the Headmaster keeps organising these little pep-talks – you'll all need to get to know one another. I need a fucking smoke," said Althea abruptly, "ask Penelope if you have any questions."

A long silence ensued.

"It's always hard to start off a conversation organically," said Harry, "so let me try at it, and if I don't succeed, we'll go around clockwise with everyone giving their best conversational prompt: Hermione, do I know you from somewhere?"

 _ **###**_

 _Hermione, do I know you from somewhere?_

The problem was, of course, that he did. Hermione knew full-well that he'd heard her doing an Estuary accent and pretending to be an older motorcyclist on a single night in February, about two years ago.

The second problem was that she hadn't expected him to recognise her. Unless she was overthinking it and Harry had genuinely made a mistake ...

No, it seemed an unlikely sort of question to ask.

Oh damn, if she thought for any longer it would look like –

"I don't think so," she said, furrowing her brow, "I know you from 'Rise and Fall' and 'A Muggleborn Guide', but I don't think we've ever met in _person_."

Harry closed his eyes and snapped his fingers. Something about the motion made her wary. "I've heard your voice before."

Damn, damn, damn. That was the problem with being clever and mysterious – people tended to remember you. "Oh! Do you listen to the radio?"

"Sometimes," Harry said, neutrally.

"The BBC interviewed our school in year eight," should she go for generalities or specifics? she'd already established that she had a good memory – so probably specifics, "it was about the IRA bombings. I talked about it, and the whole 'candid mainstream-but-insightful political opinion from a little girl' thing probably pulled a few heartstrings and they wrote my parents, asking permission to rebroadcast it a few times."

"That might've been it. Ah," Harry raised his eyebrows, and then lowered them, "I was going to bring up the Republican _motorcycle_ bombings in Sussex from earlier this week, but the IRA doesn't make for lighthearted conversation. Maybe we should move onto something else." His face was blank.

"Quite," Hermione said, her mouth dry. "Ozland?"

"Yes?" He wasn't that loud, she noticed, but his voice carried like a wineglass struck in a crowded dining room.

"Harry suggested that we go around clockwise, each giving our best conversational prompts until something stuck," she explained, desperate to move the conversation as far away as possible from anything related to the 1993 Negaloth Bombings.

"Oh." The boy tapped his index finger on his knee, as if he were discreetly communicating a signal in morse. "What's your superpower, then, Hermione?"

"Pardon?"

" _Superpower_ ," Penelope snorted, shaking her head, "unstructured magic, you mean."

"Er," she said, panicking, "it's a _power_ , maybe, not a superpower, though. I can," her voice wasn't stuck in her throat, but little pieces of it were escaping and making weird warbling sounds, "I can make it so people don't notice me. I'm not _invisible_ when I do it, I can still see my reflection in mirrors, but when I do it, it's impossible to notice me." _And I don't show up on security footage, either, but that seems like a silly thing to say._ For all she knew, she was drugged up in a government black-site where they were interrogating her before breaking apart her psyche and reassembling her into a British super-spy, or a human WMD – or maybe they would just slice up her brain. It was a miracle, really, that it hadn't happened already – if someone was less-than-discreet about their unstructured magic and the Obliviation Squad was too late, well, that person would be screwed, to say the least.

"I can fix things," Harry murmured. "The first time it happened was with my parents' wedding bowl. I wished it unbroken, and the pieces snapped cleanly back together. I genuinely thought I was hallucinating, but I wasn't. Once I'd realised that I could, I did all the usual things – run experiments, try to figure out where the limits were, find applications. You'd think," he sighed, and there was an almost palpable edge of frustration in the sigh, "that there'd be something clever you could do with it. I decided I would find something clever, make millions of pounds, conquer the universe," he looked utterly serious, but then he broke out into a good-natured smile, as if to suggest he'd been joking – of course he'd been joking – who the heck wanted to conquer the universe, anyhow?

He stopped. "My plan, the plan I drew up when I was twelve, was this: I would set up a repair shop, put it in the papers, and every night, I would come up with ten brilliant ideas and try out every single one of them, until I found some unconventional way to use my _power_ that worked, and then I would shut down the shop and go on to more pressing issues, such as solving world hunger and ending poverty by Tuesday. And, well," he shrugged, "what can I say? I'm still running that shop."

"The Repairing Charm?" said Yosif.

"Something deeper than the Repairing Charm, I think. The Repairing Charm returns things to their original states. My power is different. I can fix things into shapes they weren't in originally – ye gods, Penelope, you're not holding out on any more sensible names for it, are you? Power?"

"Apart from unstructured magic?"

"It doesn't work well, does it?" Ozland remarked. " _My unstructured magic waxes by the hour_. It's like saying benzoylmethylecgonine when you mean coke. What we're really looking for is something proper and sensible-sounding that rolls off your tongue, too."

"It's rubbish," Terry said, clearly wanting to throw in his opinion. "Our magic isn't unstructured at all."

"It's unstructured _compared_ to rituals, wand-magic, runes, divination, and just about every other field of magic," Hermione said.

"Or at least, to whatever Ministry busybody invented the term." Harry frowned. "Probably the brilliant sod who came up with the idea of naming a national exam after a nocturnal bird."

"Dwaemer," said Penelope suddenly. "In 'Taxonomica', Pongosthus divided up magic into eight fields: ritual magic, spell magic, life magic, rune magic, divination magic, artecraft magic, psychic magic, and dwaemer. Dwaemer was everything that hadn't been studied and couldn't be studied. Unconscious, deep, direct magic. Magic without an intermediary, without steps or rules or laws. It's the Old English word for magic, I think."

"Dwaemer," Hermione echoed, without thinking.

"Dwaemer," said Harry, "that fits. You know what, I thought we could do with some rebranding."

"Rebranding?" Ozland said, looking intrigued.

"Sure." He leaned back. "There's no rule against secret societies in Hogwarts, is there?"

Hermione mentally looked through the Hogwarts Rules and came up with nothing. She shook her head.

"Picture this: dark cowls, secret hand signals, spells that look a lot more powerful than they actually are, whispered rumours, blood seeping out from under doors, mystic chants – "

"I feel like I should be doing something about this," said Penelope, not quite under her breath.

"Intimidation isn't just a tool of the powerful," Harry stated. "In the sixties, the Black Panthers wanted to do something about the police randomly terrorising the ghettos. So whenever a police vehicle left the station, they followed in another car, ready with their guns. It worked: when the Panthers were around, the police were too intimidated to do anything. The Panthers could never have confronted every law enforcement agency in the United States head-on – there was an asymmetry in firepower. But what they did understand early on, was that the problem of the police keeping black communities in constant terror couldn't be rectified through superior firepower, but through superior _intimidation-power_."

"That intimidation-power is backed by fire-power, though," said Ozland, although he was nodding.

"Sure. But if every firearm owned by the police in the United States disappeared for five minutes, for those five minutes the police would still be scary."

"Because they would have tanks. And helicopters."

"Because they would have their glimmering police-badges, their guns in the holsters, their trudgeons, their 'stay calm, mam', their blue uniforms, their white skin, even. They're all symbols of intimidation, of power – symbols that people learn to respect. Pavlovian social cues. Take an ordinary person and decorate him with those symbols, and people still respect him. Maybe he'll even start thinking and acting like an officer. It's all about these," Harry's face went intense, "these unconscious _pathways_ – heuristics – carved out in people's minds that we can manipulate, reconstruct – reversing the direction of intimidation."

Terry frowned. "You were talking about this like it's a war."

"It's helpful to think about it that way. In wars, you have to identify your enemies, your allies, your resources, your constraints, your modes of attack and defense, your higher-level strategies – in other words, muddled thinking won't do. It means you're forced to think _clearly_ , to think about how to _win_."

Hermione considered this. "What should we call it though? The Muggleborn Dawn?"

"Muggle Struggle?" Ozland suggested.

"No!" Harry looked perplexed. "We're making a _secret society_ not a guerilla army, for heaven's sake. Oh, I see the irony now. Very funny."

"The Syndicate of Esteemed Professionals," Ozland fired off.

"Eighth Echo of the Atlantean Mountain-Crystal," followed Hermione.

Terry had an intense look of thought etched across his face. "Jazuul!" he burst out, triumphantly.

"Too mafia, too Illuminati – Terry, I'm not even sure what you were going for there but it doesn't work. I was more thinking . . . the Bayesian Conspiracy."

"That's a silly name," said Hermione.

"No, it isn't! Look, I'll explain, Bayes was – "

"I _know_ who Bayes was," she said, in what she hoped was a patient tone, "it just doesn't work."

"It's a _perfect_ name. It's _literally_ the guy who formalised an equation for updating beliefs with new information, and then 'conspiracy' slapped onto the end. Progress married to tradition. Openness behind closed doors. Scientific practice fused to ancient lore."

"People won't get it," she said.

"People aren't _supposed_ to get it, and if they open up a book and enlighten – heh – themselves, then all the better."

"The Pentagonal Order," Ozland began tentatively, "the Pentagonal Order of Dwaemercrafters."

"Why pentagonal?" she asked.

"I don't know, something about . . . not being able to tile properly? Look, are we trying to find _meaningful_ names or ones that _sound good_?"

"The Order of the Midnight Sun," said Kevin, very quietly. "No, hold on, that doesn't make any sense."

"Something with templars in it," suggested Terry.

"The Cabal," Yosif said, simply.

"I like it," admitted Harry. "I really like it. But it needs more."

"The Fifth Cabal," Yosif said. "Then there's the implication that there was a Fourth Cabal before us and we can make up some nonsense about what happened to them."

"I think we're aiming for the wrong thing here," said Ozland slowly. "I think we ought to try for something menacing, but surreal. Like 'The Cult of the Chilled Apricots', or 'Dumbledore's Tantric Love Goblins'."

"The Committee For Eating The Universe," said Harry.

"The Circle of the Eternal Sunshine God," said Hermione, surprising even herself. "I like that one."

"Why," Penelope began, sensibly, "don't you just make six of them and run one secret society each?"

Everyone went silent at this unexpected stroke of genius.

Terry scratched his head. "What, with one member in each? I suppose it'd be secret, but not much of a _society_."

"No, _all_ of you would be in _all_ of them, but you'd each be the leader of one."

Harry was grinning now. It made Hermione faintly worried. "Why stop at six? I can run two secret societies. Can't everyone else?"

Terry looked horrified. "You're mad. This is all mad. I don't know why it never occurred to me until just now, but all of this is mad and I don't want any part in it."

"Penelope said it best," Harry said, grinning wider than ever, "new students need to stick together."

"I – "

"I'm pretty bloody sure she didn't mean make a bloody _cult_ with _shawls_! Right, Penelope?"

"Er . . . "

"So, what you're saying is, you _don't_ want to be in the secret clubs all the rest of the Muggleborns are in?" Ozland said, straightfaced.

Terry suddenly looked uncertain. "Um."

"Maybe," said Harry, "you ought to get over your childish antipathy towards shawls. Shawls are a venerable institution of old, you know."

"Hey, it's not the _shawls_ that're the _issue_ here," Terry waved his hands about, "it's, you know, the whole _aesthetic_ associated with shawls. It's silly, if you ask me."

"And ties are just weird pieces of cloth," Harry said, and there was delight in his eyes, "but by the number of businesspeople who wear them, you wouldn't think that, would you?"

"Hold on just one minute," Ozland continued, without giving a chance for Terry to respond, "you're saying a bearded man whisked you away to an invisible dimension inside Britain where he told you you'd been accepted into a school of magic, and now you're _inside_ the school of magic, which is a castle surrounded by forest, and now that we started discussing shawls, _now_ you're saying it's all mad?"

"Do we _really_ have to use shawls?"

"Intimidation-power, not fire-power," said Harry. "Alright, I'm claiming the Committee For Eating The Universe."

Something uneasy was bubbling up inside her. "The Circle of the Eternal Sunshine God for me," said Hermione.

Yosif tilted his head. "The Communist Party of Hogwarts." (Terry snorted.)

"Um," said Ozland, "I'll lead the Invisible Syndicate."

"The Dwaemercrafters Cabal," said Terry.

Kevin shrunk. "I – I don't know. I don't think I want to lead a secret society."

"You have to make a secret society to _be_ in the Secret Society Secret Society," Harry explained. "Otherwise it wouldn't work."

"What Secret Society Secret – " said Terry, who promptly shut-up mid-sentence.

"Oh, alright, then." Kevin sounded oddly breathless. "I'll call it . . . the Secret Police."

The name gave her a strange, heavy sense of foreboding.

"That," said Harry, "is a name worthy of the S.S.S.S. Welcome aboard, Kevin."

"Er, thanks."

"Oh," said Penelope, "I'm not a part of this, am I?"

Harry looked at her sadly. "No, sorry. But if you're in Hogwarts anytime, you're free to join our secret meetings." He paused, pretending to read off of an invisible sheet of paper. "Next on the agenda: what's our secret goal?"

"Hold on, I thought we weren't _actually_ a secret society – " said Terry.

Harry cut him off. "Times have changed, and we must change with the times. The past is ashes and dust, the future stands before us, bright and glorious – "

"The past was _four minutes ago_ – "

"I think we should overthrow the Ministry," Ozland proclaimed, completely seriously.

Hermione opened her mouth, and closed it. " _I_ think we should work _within_ the Ministry to reform it into something better."

"I agree," Yosif said, surprising her. "It's what we did after the 1948 Open-Up Policy. We slowly bought out British and American companies and sabotaged them by organisational reforms. Rearranging departments to cause infighting, assigning employees to the least-optimal jobs, creating new and riskier financial instruments that chained into one another, collecting blackmail material and publishing it to Western audiences to undermine their trust in their own leadership, moving equipment to within Soviet borders . . . it's much more subtle, too."

"Nice infodump. We don't have the resources of the Soviet Union, though," said Harry. "And they still took twenty years."

"We may not be the Soviet Union, but the Ministry isn't the United States, either," remarked Yosif.

"The Ministry isn't going to collapse from inefficiency," Ozland added. "It thrives off of inefficiency. It exists _to be_ inefficient. Ron's dad says there's a drywall regulatory commission for the Office of Self-Referential Office Names – they employ forty people, praise be Matchwell. Overthrowing a government is just reforming it very, very quickly, anyhow."

"The last time someone tried to overthrow the Ministry, a quarter of wizarding Britain died," said Penelope. A hush followed her remark.

"Then we'll do it better. A bloodless coup," Ozland said, heedlessly. "We'll just Imperius all the most important people and see what happens from there."

"The Office of Internal Security runs regular sweeps for mental magics," Hermione countered. "And I doubt any of us could pull off the Imperius Curse. What kind of awful security would the Ministry have to have for a group of teenagers to be able to infiltrate it, anyway?"

"I think we really need a . . . " Ozland wasn't pausing, he was obviously trying to say something but for whatever reason, he couldn't say it. His demeanour became calculating. "Imagine a box that, when opened, prevented all secrets spoken in its vicinity from being spoken about outside of those who had heard it initially. Wouldn't that be something?"

"Oh, a Secret Box, you mean?" asked Penelope.

"Yes," Ozland said, seeming relieved. "Does anyone know where to buy a Secret Box?"

Nobody did.

"I don't intend to overthrow, dehegemonise, or conduct a protracted struggle against the Ministry or any of its affiliates," said Harry, suddenly. "All discussion on my part is purely hypothetical and in the interest of helping the Ministry establish better security protocols. I won't ever involve myself in an anti-Ministry organisation, anything I say to the contrary following or preceding this statement is in pure jest." And then, in a lighter tone: "Hermione, why don't you tell us about Veritaserum?"

She was confused. "It's a potion which forces the drinker to tell the truth. One drop – _oh_ , I see. Um, one drop makes the drinker more truthful, but doesn't compel them. Two drops makes them tell the truth, but gives them leeway in which parts of it they disclose. Three drops makes them spill out the entire truth. The truth, nothing but the truth, and the whole truth. Also, what Harry said. The Ministry is great, yaddah yaddah."

Ozland looked contemplative, and then the same thought struck him, too – she could see it. "I don't intend to do any of those things either. I, too, discuss these matters in jest."

Penelope caught on soon afterward. "As a Ministry employee and a respectable witch who has listened to their conversation so far, I believe that neither Harry, Hermione Granger, nor Ozland Cunningham are the sort of people who would do illegal things like overthrowing the Ministry or wanting to overthrow the Ministry in the first place."

Terry was utterly confused. "What what what?"

Yosif smiled wanly. "I concur with Penelope's observations and believe that everything that has been said so far is true and authentic. I, similarly, have no wish to undermine the unquestionable authority of the Ministry of Magic and strongly condemn those who do. All hail the Ministry."

"All hail the Ministry," Kevin repeated.

"Can someone tell me what the hell is going on?"

Everyone looked at each other uneasily. Harry spoke first. "Say someone had to testify under Veritaserum about a conversation. Maybe the interrogator is asking about what people said – "

"What, so you're only saying all of this so if the Ministry hauls us in – "

"Shut up," suggested Ozland. "Shut up right now or I'll tear your guts out, tie them into a pretzel, and put them back inside your body." It was an absurd and heavy-handed threat, but there was something intimidating about the way he spoke that made Hermione think he'd find something else less absurd but just as painful and do that instead. Seeing her stare at him, she could have sworn he winked, but when she looked again, there was no trace of levity in his face.

Terry paled. "Oh. What I was going to say was: so you're only saying all of this so if the Ministry hauls us in . . . "

"So if the good and fine Ministry _brings us in_ for questioning for _whatever reason_ , we will be able to be perfectly truthful with them," Harry continued, smoothly. "Yes, Ozland, I'll see if I can get myself a Secret Box for my own purposes as a private citizen, as is my right under Ministry law, which it is very important not to break. On a totally unrelated note, perhaps we should arrange for lessons in Occlumency, which assists with protecting against mental intrusion."

"That's a good idea," Ozland said stiltedly. "In the meanwhile, we should focus on the _real_ purpose of the Secret Society Secret Society, which is to amend Wizengamot law, allowing Muggleborn students to enroll in Hogwarts in their First Year."

"Yes, the _real_ purpose," she muttered.

Ozland leant forward. "The whole business with estranged wizards – and witches," he corrected himself, "I'm not sure if there's a gender-neutral word in common use – "

"Mages," Hermione said without thinking.

"Mages," Ozland acknowledged, "the whole business with estranged mages – that's the term for it, I remember now – starting in Fifth Year, it's bullshit, isn't it? What the hell was the Wizengamot thinking when they made that policy?"

By the vigorous nods from around the circle, this seemed to be a very popular sentiment.

"Bullshit," Terry Boot said, recovering quickly from his earlier terror. He repeated 'bullshit' a few more times, turning it into a gloomy mantra. "You heard Al," ( _he's calling Althea 'Al'?_ , Hermione thought, incredulously) "how could anyone be expected to catch up with four years worth of _magic_?"

"That's the point," Harry said, "we're not supposed to be able to. It's obvious from a game-theoretic standpoint." He opened his mouth, as if he was about to continue, but seemed to consciously stop himself, to think for a moment. "There's a book in the Hogwarts Library in the north-north-west shelf," he started. "It lists each result for each exam for every student before 1977. Now," he held up his hand in a conciliatory gesture, "I haven't gone through the whole thing myself. _But,_ Jorgan Perrault _did_ , and wrote a paper on his findings – and this is the exact number – he found that Muggleborns score an average of 5.4 points higher on exams. Once you remove Muggle Studies from the dataset, it comes down to 2.2 points. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to why I'm bringing this up?"

"What," Terry said, "you thinking the Wibblegambit, er, Wizardgimblet – ah, fuck it, one made-up word is as good as another – you think they deliberately _crippled_ – "

"Is it because we have more of a motivation to study?" Penelope said. "We don't have any property or connections or wealth in the wizarding world, so that means Muggleborns compensate through working harder . . . ?" she trailed off.

Harry held up a finger. "Perrault suggested a few reasons why that might be the case, including that, but it's not why I'm mentioning the study. The Perrault study caused a major internal rift within, well, calling them the _anti-Muggleborn_ faction would be reductionist, but they don't have a name for themselves – for that matter, I don't think they don't even think of themselves as a faction, really," he added, pensively, "but anyhow, it caused a fair deal of trouble for them, challenging ideological preconceptions and whatnot. It was impossible for any sane person to reject the paper as Muggleborn propaganda. Perrault was a pureblood and even _he_ was surprised by his own findings, and it's based in data that just about anyone can access. The Perrault study was undeniable. They didn't want to change their maps, so they changed the territory."

This remark received many confused looks.

Harry shook his head, as if remonstrating himself. "They had a belief, which was that Muggleborns are inferior in terms of magical performance to purebloods due to the impurity of their bloodlines, and a reality that didn't fit. So they changed reality so it _did_."

The room was quiet for a moment as everybody absorbed the implications of what Harry had said.

"That's brilliant, really," Ozland said. "And I suppose it didn't need any grand conspiracy either, just rich toffs deciding to vote in favour to spite Dumbledore and his people, I'd think."

...

...

Hermione heard the click of a mechanical stopwatch. Harry held it up by its chain and examined it. "Fifteen minutes of conversation without a single awkward pause," he said. "My fault for bringing up something so esoteric. Alright, let's go around. Kevin?"

"Pass."

Terry also passed.

"Hermione?"

"Ozland, you said you were involved in paragovernmental affairs."

"I wanted to follow up on that, too," Harry admitted. "It sounded very plot-hook-y."

"What's there to say?"

"You know," Harry said, "which paragovernment. In what way you're involved. Those sort of things."

"Um. Is anyone here an Unorthdoxist?"

Harry's eyes shone with suppressed amusement. He held up a finger. "Oh, no. This is perfect. Don't tell me. You unintentionally used dwaemer once and people thought it was a miracle and now you're some sort of Messianic politico-religious figure."

"You really figured all of that out from a single question?"

"No, your face was on the _Express_ the other day and the article went into it. The rest is just familiarity with literary tropes – I couldn't put my finger on it until you asked."

"For the benefit of the people who haven't read that particular issue of the _Express_ ," Hermione said (and there was a little part of her that was ashamed to admit she _hadn't_ read something), "who is Ozland, exactly?"

"He's the leader of a cult-mafia-junta thing," said Harry, looking absolutely overjoyed for some reason, "produces half the illegal drugs in the Pacific, major black market trafficker, massacres and tortures his opponents, has nuclear weapons, brainwashes his people with quack religious doctrine. At least, that's what the _Express_ thinks. Ozland, care to comment?"

"I wouldn't expect anyone living in the opulent metropole of Britain to understand." Ozland stared off distantly, over her head. She knew it was theatre, but it didn't make it any less effective. "The Celestian Unorthodox Church fills social voids. As a spiritual organisation, we provide hope to the hopeless. As a paragovernment, we create order out of disorder. As a network of public and private enterprises, we give the needy what they need. Drugs? Caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco are drugs, sure-as-hell, and I don't see any moral outrage directed at coffee beans. Legality isn't morality, Harry.

"Human trafficking? We help people get from A to B. We're an intercontinental bus service, making safe passage for families crossing oceans to get one step closer to their dreams. We oil the machine of demand and supply and assist with economic recovery. Brainwashing? In our schools, we provide a free education not only in science and mathematics, but in love, kindness, and respect. Is any of that so bad?"

"And nuclear weapons?" Hermione asked.

"I think every country deserves the right to its own sovereignty, Hermione. Conventional militaries are expensive. Wouldn't you rather that money be spent on helping the poor and treating the ill? Without a nuclear-response system, every nation is a sitting duck, ready to be shot down by the British Empire."

"Massacring and torturing your opponents, then?"

"Puerile war-propaganda. We work with our opponents. We believe in synthesis, not antithesis. In diplomacy, the Church builds bridges, not bombs."

Hermione sat back. There was something oddly enthralling about seeing the truth spun so boldly. "You really _are_ . . . wow."

"I know," Ozland smiled thinly, "I'm not that persuasive when you put me on the spot, though. All of those things are things I've had to respond to over the years, so I suppose you could say it's a prepared spiel."

"Do you believe it?" Penelope questioned.

"I don't know. It's not really that important."

Althea strutted into the room. "Meet-and-greet is over, folks. Hermione, Harry, Terry, Kevin, if you run, you'll be able to catch the eleven o'clock from Hogsmeade to King's Cross. Yosif, the Hedge should take you to the Kirghiz Embassy. Ozland, Professor McGonagall's office, ASAP."

 _ **##**_

"So," said Harry. "Mind telling me the truth?"

Messing around with gravity was the final middle-finger that wizarding Britain had delivered to the mundane universe. Sure, the Levitation Charm had been around since the mid-sixteenth century at the very latest (U. Pin-de-Éare, 'Conquering Gravity'), but actually changing the direction and magnitude of gravity within a given space hadn't been perfected until 1956. Maybe, Hermione thought, the gravityless nature of the corridor of the train wasn't just a pointless gimmick, but had some sort of indecipherable reasoning behind it.

The compartment was rather large, and since Harry had insisted that Terry and Kevin find a different compartment, it was much too large for comfort with only the two of them sitting there.

All of these thoughts flashed through her head as she opened her mouth.

"Well," she said, "that would take a very long time, Harry Potter."

 _ **#######**_

THE DEPARTMENT OF MYSTERIES – FEBRUARY 2, 1931

There was a centre, there was always a centre.

The Head Unspeakable watched, distantly, as molten stone sloughed off onto the floor. A powerful ritual had been conducted here. An imperfect ritual, evidently. The floor itself looked as if some malevolent god had taken an eggbeater to the granite foundations. It still swirled subtly, never quite settling, like a cyclone.

And in the eye of the cyclone . . .

The Head Unspeakable had a staff. All wizards who mattered a damn had staffs, even if they denied it. His looked a bit like a totem pole with a thousand intricate, monstrous faces etched in. It gleamed with gold.

The Head Unspeakable used the staff to prod the head of Reginald Rookwood, who was lying, face-down, in the centre.

Rookwood groaned. He turned over. He blinked three times, and then jumped a bit when he saw the Head Unspeakable looming over him.

"What," said the Head Unspeakable, "were you trying to do?"

"Um," said Reginald, "promise you won't get angry?"

 _ **#######**_

LEVEL MINUS TWENTY-EIGHT – TWENTY YEARS LATER

"As you can see," the Unspeakable explained as they came down the spiral staircase, "the leylines are humming along quite nicely. New ones are opening up every day."

"Ah, these must be the special leylines," Dumbledore said.

"How do you mean, sir?"

"These leylines glow brightly, emerging from a single point," continued Dumbledore, kindly. "They must be _very_ special leylines, indeed, to diverge so much from their cousins, who are nigh imperceptible to the unaided eye, only trace the contours of the Earth, and can be passed through without harm – unlike these, I hear."

"Of course," replied the Unspeakable, hoping that his voice wasn't wavering, "naturally. Ah, very well-observed, sir. These are _artificial_ leylines, after all. A different beast entirely."

There was a cracking sound. Before he could react, a triangular fragment of reality flew at them. The Unspeakable ducked. Dumbledore caught it between thumb and forefinger.

The Unspeakable turned, aghast, seeing the hole it had left behind. Violent, golden light spilled out into the room. Dumbledore walked forward to the hole, and neatly plugged it up.

His face was grim. "A different beast entirely," he said. "The Head Unspeakable and I have many things to discuss, it seems."

 _ **#######**_


End file.
